Efficient partial-surface registration for 3D objects

We present a new method for three-dimensional partial-surface registration that utilizes both regional surface properties and shape rigidity constraint to align a partial object surface and its corresponding complete surface. The statistical properties of the vertices on the object surface are first computed and compared with each other to find the initial candidate correspondences. We use the overall object-shape rigidity constraint and a clustering method to obtain an approximation of the transformation parameters while, at the same time, rejecting correspondence outliers. The transformation parameters can be further refined with an iterative approach. The algorithm does not require any feature extraction or initial pose estimation, and is especially applicable when the object surfaces are formed by a large number of vertices, smooth with few salient features, and contain many regionally similar surface patches. Experiments confirm that the proposed scheme can achieve accurate registration results in an efficient manner.