Evolutionary Multiform Optimization With Two-Stage Bidirectional Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is an important task in computer vision, where the goal is to estimate a transformation to align a pair of point clouds. Most of the existing registration methods face the problems of poor robustness and getting stuck in local optima. Evolutionary multitasking is an effective paradigm to enhance global search capability and improve convergence characteristics through knowledge transfer across multiple related tasks. Inspired by evolutionary multitasking, this article proposes a multiform optimization approach through evolutionary multitasking for solving the point cloud registration problems. We first construct two related registration tasks with different functional landscapes to form a multiform optimization problem. Compared with methods that only focus on a single registration attribute, the two proposed tasks focus on robustness and precision of registration, respectively. Then, a new two-stage bidirectional knowledge transfer strategy is presented, which can implement efficient knowledge transfer among two related tasks. Finally, both simulations and real experiments show the power of our method. The proposed method is robust to noise, outliers, and partial overlaps and is effective in multiple real registration scenarios, such as object registration, scene reconstruction, and simultaneous localization and mapping.