A comprehensive review of 3D point cloud descriptors

The introduction of inexpensive 3D data acquisition devices has promisingly facilitated the wide availability and popularity of 3D point cloud, which attracts more attention on the effective extraction of novel 3D point cloud descriptors for accurate and efficient of 3D computer vision tasks. However, how to develop discriminative and robust feature descriptors from various point clouds remains a challenging task. This paper comprehensively investigates the existing approaches for extracting 3D point cloud descriptors which are categorized into three major classes: local-based descriptor, global-based descriptor and hybrid-based descriptor. Furthermore, experiments are carried out to present a thorough evaluation of performance of several state-of-the-art 3D point cloud descriptors used widely in practice in terms of descriptiveness, robustness and efficiency.