VFLD: Voxelized Fractal Local Descriptor

A variety of methods for 3D object recognition and registration based on a deep learning pipeline have recently emerged. Nonetheless, these methods require large amounts of data that are not easy to obtain, sometimes rendering them virtually useless in real-life scenarios due to a lack of generalization capabilities. To counter this, we propose a novel local descriptor that takes advantage of the fractal dimension. For each 3D point, we create a descriptor by computing the fractal dimension of the neighbors at different radii. Our redmethod has many benefits, such as being agnostic to the sensor of choice and noise, up to a level, and having few parameters to tinker with. Furthermore, it requires no training and does not rely on semantic information. We test our descriptor using well-known datasets and it largely outperforms Fast Point Feature Histogram, which is the state-of-the-art descriptor for 3D data. We also apply our descriptor to a registration pipeline and achieve accurate three-dimensional representations of the scenes, which are captured with a commercial sensor.