PCSS: 3D Keypoint Detection for Point Clouds Using Structural Saliency

3D keypoint detection is of great interest to researchers in computer vision and graphics because it is an integral part of realizing many tasks, such as object tracking, 3D reconstruction, and shape registration. However, it is challenging to detect 3D keypoints quickly and stably due to the ambiguity of the keypoints and the presence of noise, density changes, and geometric distortions in the 3D point cloud. This paper proposes a novel 3D keypoint detection method based on point cloud structural saliency (PCSS) to realize stable and efficient 3D keypoint detection. First, we propose an effective point cloud feature descriptor called local spatial geometric feature, which can effectively combine spatial and geometric information to improve feature distinguishability. Second, we define a point cloud structural saliency representation that effectively characterizes the structured information in the point cloud. Finally, we generate 3D keypoints based on point cloud structural saliency using a non-maximum suppression method. We evaluate our method on five 3D keypoint benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D keypoint detection. Comparing it with previous keypoint detection methods further demonstrates the effectiveness and superiority of our method.