Joint Pose and Principal Curvature Refinement Using Quadrics

Abstract: In this paper we present a novel joint approach for optimising surface curvature and pose alignment. We present two implementations of this joint optimisation strategy, including a fast implementation that uses two frames and an offline multi-frame approach. We demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in simulation over state of the art dense relative point-to-plane Iterative Closest Point (ICP) pose alignment using our dense joint frame-to-frame approach and show comparable pose drift to dense point-to-plane ICP bundle adjustment using low-cost depth sensors. Additionally our improved joint quadric based approach can be used to more accurately estimate surface curvature on noisy point clouds than previous approaches.