Affine iterative closest point algorithm for point set registration
Shaoyi Du
a,
*
, Nanning Zheng
a
, Shihui Ying
b
, Jianyi Liu
a
a
Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
b
Department of Mathematics, School of Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
article info
Article history:
Received 24 April 2009
Received in revised form 15 January 2010
Available online 25 January 2010
Communicated by Y. Liu
Keywords:
Affine point set registration
Iterative closest point algorithm
Lie group
Singular value decomposition
Independent component analysis
abstract
The traditional iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is accurate and fast for rigid point set registration
but it is unable to handle affine case. This paper instead introduces a novel generalized ICP algorithm
based on lie group for affine registration of m-D point sets. First, with singular value decomposition tech-
nique applied, this paper decomposes affine transformation into three special matrices which are then
constrained. Then, these matrices are expressed by exponential mappings of lie group and their Taylor
approximations at each iterative step of affine ICP algorithm. In this way, affine registration problem is
ultimately simplified to a quadratic programming problem. By solving this quadratic problem, the new
algorithm converges monotonically to a local minimum from any given initial parameters. Hence, to
reach desired minimum, good initial parameters and constraints are required which are successfully esti-
mated by independent component analysis. This new algorithm is independent of shape representation
and feature extraction, and thereby it is a general framework for affine registration of m-D point sets.
Experimental results demonstrate its robustness and efficiency compared with the traditional ICP algo-
rithm and the state-of-the-art methods.
Ó 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Point set registration is one of the important research issues in
pattern recognition and computer vision due to its wide applica-
tions such as face recognition (Abate et al., 2008), computer aided
design (Shammaa et al., 2007) and 3D reconstruction (Megyesi
et al., 2006), etc. However, point set registration is of great diffi-
culty in three aspects: (1) point correspondence is unknown, (2)
transformation is unknown, and (3) there is not enough informa-
tion about the physical properties of objects. One of the accurate
and efficient approaches to solve the problem above is the iterative
closest point (ICP) algorithm (Besl and McKay, 1992; Chen and Ger-
ard, 1992; Zhang, 1994) which has been widely used in a variety of
fields.
In the past decade, a number of scholars have studied the tradi-
tional ICP algorithm on how to speed it up. Fitzgibbon (2003) em-
ployed the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm to accelerate ICP, and
Jost and Hugli (2003) combined a coarse-to-fine multi-resolution
technique with the neighbor search algorithm into ICP to improve
the registration. Moreover, many scholars have introduced other
methods into ICP for its more robustness. Lee et al. (2000) pro-
posed a measure for estimating the reliability of ICP. Invariant fea-
tures were described by Sharp et al. (2002) to decrease the
probability of being trapped in a local minimum. Granger and Pen-
nec (2002) added Expectation–Maximization principles to ICP and
used a coarse-to-fine approach based on an annealing scheme to
improve the robustness. Liu (2006) combined the SoftAssign and
EMICP algorithms for the automatic registration of overlapping
3D point clouds. Phillips et al. (2007) proposed a fractional ICP
algorithm which can identify and discard outliers. As for the over-
view of point set registration using ICP method, one can refer to
(Planitz et al., 2005; Makadia et al., 2006; Smith et al., 2008) a step
further.
The original ICP algorithm has been widely applied to rigid reg-
istration, but it does not work well in non-rigid registration prob-
lems. Du et al. (2007) proposed an extension of the ICP Algorithm
for scaling registration. Amberg et al. (2007) used an additional
stiffness term and a landmark term for locally affine regularization,
which is based on the extended ICP algorithm. Some scholars man-
aged to solve non-rigid registration problems but they avoided
using the ICP algorithm. Jian and Vemuri (2005) proposed a robust
approach for non-rigid registration by using mixture of Gaussian.
Chui et al. (2004) and Wang et al. (2008) presented algorithms to
register multiple unlabeled point sets to an emerging mean shape.
In non-rigid registration, affine registration is an important and
key problem. When affine transformation is considered to register
two point sets without noise, the error of least square (LS) problem
is 0, but affine transformation is not unique. For example, if two
point sets are best matched with the true affine transformation,
the error is 0. However, if the affine transformation is close to 0,
0167-8655/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2010.01.020
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 29 82668802x8010; fax: +86 29 83237910.
E-mail addresses: dushaoyi@gmail.com (S. Du), nnzheng@aiar.xjtu.edu.cn (N.
Zheng), yingshihui@gmail.com (S. Ying), jyliu@aiar.xjtu.edu.cn (J. Liu).
Pattern Recognition Letters 31 (2010) 791–799
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Pattern Recognition Letters
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/patrec