Performance Analysis of Nearest Neighbor Algorithms for ICP Registration of 3-D Point Sets

There are many nearest neighbor algorithms tailormade for ICP, but most of them require special input data like range images or triangle meshes. We focus on efficient nearest neighbor algorithms that do not impose this limitation, and thus can also be used with 3-D point sets generated by structure-frommotion techniques. We shortly present the evaluated algorithms and introduce the modifications we made to improve their efficiency. In particular, several enhancements to the well-known k-D tree algorithm are described. The first part of our performance analysis consists of experiments on synthetic point sets, whereas the second part features experiments with the ICP algorithm on real point sets. Both parts are completed by a thorough evaluation of the obtained results.