Geometry-to-Image Synthesis-Driven Generative Point Cloud Registration

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel 3D registration paradigm, Generative Point Cloud Registration, which bridges advanced 2D generative models with 3D matching tasks to enhance registration performance. Our key idea is to generate cross-view consistent image pairs that are well-aligned with the source and target point clouds, enabling geometry-color feature fusion to facilitate robust matching. To ensure high-quality matching, the generated image pair should feature both 2D-3D geometric consistency and cross-view texture consistency. To this end, we introduce DepthMatch-ControlNet and LiDARMatch-ControlNet, two matching-specific, controllable 2D generative models. Specifically, for depth camera-based 3D registration with point clouds derived from the depth maps, DepthMatch-ControlNet leverages the depth-conditioned generation capabilities of ControlNet to synthesize perspective-view RGB images that are geometrically consistent with depth maps, ensuring accurate 2D-3D alignment. Additionally, by incorporating a coupled conditional denoising scheme and coupled prompt guidance, it further promotes cross-view feature interaction, guiding texture consistency generation. To address LiDAR-based 3D registration with point clouds captured by LiDAR sensors, LiDARMatch-ControlNet extends this framework by conditioning on paired equirectangular range maps projected from 360-degree LiDAR point clouds, generating corresponding panoramic RGB images. Our generative 3D registration paradigm is general and can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of existing registration methods to improve their performance. Extensive experiments on the 3DMatch and ScanNet datasets (for depth-camera settings), as well as the Dur360BEV dataset (for LiDAR settings), demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Journal extension of the ICML 2025 paper "Generative Point Cloud Registration". This version adopts a new title, and includes substantial methodological improvements, additional experiments, and extended analysis. Under review at IEEE TPAMI