Looks like you have to create the container on the target system first. Not necessarily run it, but just create it. So if you were using the CRIU examples, you’d have a busybox container named cr on the source system. Once you create the checkpoint on the source system, you need to copy that checkpoint directory to your target system (typically in /var/lib/docker/containers/). On the target system, you’d need to do sudo docker create --name cr busybox and then your restore command which would look like sudo docker start --checkpoint checkpoint1 --checkpoint-dir /tmp cr.
Hope this helps! I was able to test this on 2 identical Centos 7.2 machines (kernel 3.10.0-327.13.1.el7.x86_64) using Docker 17.03.1-ce with experimental mode on and criu 2.3 both packages installed with yum.