<title>Progressive registration of range image based on surface triangulation</title>

Abstract

In this paper, a novel method for registration of range images from multiple viewpoints is presented. The algorithm encompasses two stages -- surface approximation using triangular mesh and progressive registration. It first generates triangular meshes interpolating the underlying surfaces represented by the range images in progressive levels of detail (LOD). The triangulation algorithm is capable of identifying feature points among all the samples and therefore can not only provide distinctive landmark control points critical for registration accuracy but also substantially reduces the registration complexity. At the registration stage, based on the features that triangular meshes have captured, corresponding vertices can easily be located and the least-square method is applied to the set of control points in the coarse triangular meshes to derive an initial transformation. The registration will then be iteratively performed on finer meshes to further improve the transformation accuracy. The classic Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is modified and integrated with this progressive registration method based on surface triangulation. This approach overcomes the drawbacks of the classic ICP, namely it no longer requires one surface be the subset of the other and it does not need an initial transformation -- a sufficiently close alignment to avoid the convergence to a local minimum. In addition, the surface information provided by the triangular mesh helps with registration accuracy, and results in fast convergence. Experiment have been conducted on benchmark images, the superior results confirm the effectiveness of this novel approach.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.