  In this paper, we propose a novel local descriptor-based framework, called
You Only Hypothesize Once (YOHO), for the registration of two unaligned point
clouds. In contrast to most existing local descriptors which rely on a fragile
local reference frame to gain rotation invariance, the proposed descriptor
achieves the rotation invariance by recent technologies of group equivariant
feature learning, which brings more robustness to point density and noise.
Meanwhile, the descriptor in YOHO also has a rotation equivariant part, which
enables us to estimate the registration from just one correspondence
hypothesis. Such property reduces the searching space for feasible
transformations, thus greatly improves both the accuracy and the efficiency of
YOHO. Extensive experiments show that YOHO achieves superior performances with
much fewer needed RANSAC iterations on four widely-used datasets, the
3DMatch/3DLoMatch datasets, the ETH dataset and the WHU-TLS dataset. More
details are shown in our project page: https://hpwang-whu.github.io/YOHO/.
