Fast Iterative Closest Point framework for 3D LIDAR data in intelligent vehicle

The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is one of the most popular methods for geometric alignment of 3-dimensional data points. We focus on how to make it faster for 3D range scanner in intelligent vehicle. The ICP algorithm mainly consists of two parts: nearest neighbor search and estimation of transformation between two data sets. The former is the most time consuming process. Many variants of the k-d trees have been introduced to accelerate the search. This paper presents a remarkably efficient search procedure, exploiting two concepts of approximate nearest neighbor and local search. Consequently, the proposed algorithm is about 24 times faster than the standard k-d tree.