Shape binary patterns: an efficient local descriptor and keypoint detector for point clouds

Many of the research problems in robot vision involve the detection of keypoints, areas with salient information in the input images and the generation of local descriptors, that encode relevant information for such keypoints. Computer vision solutions have recently relied on Deep Learning techniques, which make extensive use of the computational capabilities available. In autonomous robots, these capabilities are usually limited and, consequently, images cannot be processed adequately. For this reason, some robot vision tasks still benefit from a more classic approach based on keypoint detectors and local descriptors. In 2D images, the use of binary representations for visual tasks has shown that, with lower computational requirements, they can obtain a performance comparable to classic real-value techniques. However, these achievements have not been fully translated to 3D images, where research is mainly focused on real-value approaches. Thus, in this paper, we propose a keypoint detector and local descriptor based on 3D binary patterns. The experimentation demonstrates that our proposal is competitive against state-of-the-art techniques, while its processing can be performed more efficiently.