A Robust Method for Rotation Estimation Using Spherical Harmonics Representation

This paper presents a robust method for 3D object rotation estimation using spherical harmonics representation and the unit quaternion vector. The proposed method provides a closed-form solution for rotation estimation without recurrence relations or searching for point correspondences between two objects. The rotation estimation problem is casted as a minimization problem, which finds the optimum rotation angles between two objects of interest in the frequency domain. The optimum rotation angles are obtained by calculating the unit quaternion vector from a symmetric matrix, which is constructed from the two sets of spherical harmonics coefficients using eigendecomposition technique. Our experimental results on hundreds of 3D objects show that our proposed method is very accurate in rotation estimation, robust to noisy data, missing surface points, and can handle intra-class variability between 3D objects.