Instance by instance: An iterative framework for multi-instance 3d registration

Multi-instance registration is a challenging problem in computer vision and robotics, where multiple instances of an object need to be registered in a standard coordinate system. Pioneers followed a non-extensible one-shot framework, which prioritizes the registration of simple and isolated instances, often struggling to accurately register challenging or occluded instances. To address these challenges, we propose the first iterative framework for multi-instance 3D registration (MI-3DReg) in this work, termed instance-by-instance (IBI). It successively registers instances while systematically reducing outliers, starting from the easiest and progressing to more challenging ones. This enhances the likelihood of effectively registering instances that may have been initially overlooked, allowing for successful registration in subsequent iterations. Under the IBI framework, we further propose a sparse-to-dense correspondence-based multi-instance registration method (IBI-S2DC) to enhance the robustness of MI-3DReg. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of IBI and suggested the new state-of-the-art performance with IBI-S2DC, e.g., our mean registration F1 score is 12.02%/12.35% higher than the existing state-of-the-art on the synthetic/real datasets. The source codes are availableonline at https://github.com/caoxy01/IBI.