Physically Based Rigid Registration of 3-D Free-Form Objects : application to Medical Imaging

Abstract

: The registration of 3-D objects is an important problem in computer vision and especially in medical imaging. It arises when data acquired by different sensors and/or at different times have to be fused. Under the basic assumption that the objects to be registered are rigid, the problem is to recover the six parameters of a rigid transformation. If landmarks or common characteristics are not available, the problem has to be solved by an iterative method. However such methods are inevitably attracted to local minima. This paper presents a novel iterative method designed for the rigid registration of 3-D objects. Its originality lies in its physical basis: instead of minimizing an energy function with respect to the parameters of the rigid transformation (the classical approach) the minimization is achieved by studying the motion of a rigid object in a potential field. In particular, we consider the kinetic energy of the solid during the registration process, which allows it to "jump o...