Point cloud registration is a crucial aspect of computer vision and 3D reconstruction. Traditional registration methods often depend on global features or iterative optimisation, leading to inefficiencies and imprecise outcomes when processing complex scene point cloud data. To address these challenges, the authors introduce a principal direction-guided local voxelisation structural feature (PDLVSF) approach for point cloud registration. This method reliably identifies feature points regardless of initial positioning. Approach begins with the 3D Harris algorithm to extract feature points, followed by determining the principal direction within the feature points' radius neighbourhood to ensure rotational invariance. For scale invariance, voxel grid normalisation is utilised to maximise the point cloud's geometric resolution and make it scale-independent. Cosine similarity is then employed for effective feature matching, identifying corresponding feature point pairs and determining transformation parameters between point clouds. Experimental validations on various datasets, including the real terrain dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Results indicate superior performance in root mean square error (RMSE) and registration accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods, particularly in scenarios with high noise, limited overlap, and significant initial pose rotation. The real terrain dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/black-2000/Real-terrain-data.
