FlashReg: GPU-Accelerated 3-Clique Point Cloud Registration for Real-Time Correspondence-to-Pose Estimation

Abstract

Graph-based point cloud registration achieves high robustness by identifying geometrically consistent correspondence sets, but constructing second-order compatibility graphs and enumerating candidate cliques remain compute- and memory-intensive. This work presents FlashReg, a GPU-oriented correspondence-to-pose estimator that avoids materializing the dense scored second-order graph. Its Fast First- and Second-Order Graph (FFSOG) construction builds a capacity-bounded sparse second-order graph directly from the binary first-order graph. A dataflow-optimized three-node clique (3-clique) search then selects pivots from compact per-row candidate pools and enumerates triples through sorted sparse-neighborhood intersections. Across indoor and outdoor benchmarks, FlashReg reduces correspondence-to-pose latency by 2--3x relative to TurboReg at comparable registration recall, while using about 50% of its peak allocated tensor memory on an embedded GPU. These results make FlashReg suitable as a high-throughput registration backend within onboard perception pipelines.