Intensity-guided pose-free pairwise registration for single-photon view fusion

Abstract

Single-photon light detection and ranging (LiDAR) extends active three-dimensional sensing at the fundamental level and has found applications in extreme environments involving long-range operation, low-reflectance targets, and adverse visibility. However, the acquired measurements often give rise to single-photon point clouds that are sparse, spatially non-uniform, and corrupted by outliers and depth distortions, making pairwise registration challenging especially when sensor poses are not accurately known. In this work, we present a geometry-intensity coupled registration framework (GIC-Reg) for pose-free pairwise registration in single-photon multi-view sensing. It is established by combining intensity-guided preprocessing, joint geometry-intensity grid feature aggregation, global matching, and local ambiguity disambiguation to estimate inter-view rigid transformations and hence to support subsequent single-photon view fusion. On the synthetic benchmark, it achieves the lowest relative rotation error (RRE), relative translation error, and root mean square error across all background-noise and dropout rates, in comparison to baselines. Notably, under the most degraded dropout, it reduces the RRE from $13.167^{\circ }$ to $8.459^{\circ }$ compared with the learning-based baseline. Furthermore, experimental results on real two-view data acquired at about 80~m show that it achieves more reliable global orientation and local alignment. Our results show that photon intensity provides an effective reliability-related cue for stabilizing pairwise registration in single-photon point clouds, and thus our work supports practical pose-free registration for single-photon sensing.