This paper presents a mutual information (MI) based algorithm for the
estimation of full 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) rigid body transformation between
two overlapping point clouds. We first divide the scene into a 3D voxel grid
and define simple to compute features for each voxel in the scan. The two scans
that need to be aligned are considered as a collection of these features and
the MI between these voxelized features is maximized to obtain the correct
alignment of scans. We have implemented our method with various simple point
cloud features (such as number of points in voxel, variance of z-height in
voxel) and compared the performance of the proposed method with existing
point-to-point and point-to- distribution registration methods. We show that
our approach has an efficient and fast parallel implementation on GPU, and
evaluate the robustness and speed of the proposed algorithm on two real-world
datasets which have variety of dynamic scenes from different environments