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Handling deformation is one of the biggest challenges associated with point cloud registration. When deformation happens due to the motion of an animated object which actively changes its location and general shape, registration of two instances of the same object turns out to be a challenging task. The focus of this work is to address the problem by leveraging the complementary attributes of local and global geometric structures of the point clouds. We define an energy function which consists of local and global terms, as well as a semi-local term to model the intermediate level geometry of the point cloud. The local energy estimates the transformation parameters at the lowest level by assuming a reduced deformation model. The parameters are estimated in a closed form solution, which are then used to assign the initial probability of a stochastic model working at the intermediate level. The global energy term estimates the overall transformation parameters by minimizing a nonlinear least square function via Gauss-Newton optimization framework. The total energy is optimized in a block coordinate descent fashion, updating one term at a time while keeping others constant. Experiments on three publicly available datasets show that the method performs significantly better than several state-of-the-art algorithms in registering pairwise point cloud data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method for coarse alignment of point clouds by introducing a new descriptor based on the local curvature. The method is developed for model fitting a CAD model for use in robotic assembly. The method is based on selecting keypoints depending on shape factors calculated from the local covariance matrix of the surface. A descriptor is then calculated for each keypoint by fitting two spheres that describe the curvature of the surface. The spheres are calculated using conformal geometric algebra, which gives a convenient and efficient description of the geometry. The keypoint descriptors for the model and the observed point cloud are then compared to estimate the corresponding keypoints, which are used to calculate the displacement. The method is tested in several experiments. One experiment is for robotic assembly, where objects are placed on a table and their position and orientation is estimated using a 3-D CAD model. Note to Practitioners— 3-D cameras can be used in robotic assembly for recognizing objects, and for determining the position and orientation of parts to be assembled. In such applications, 3-D CAD models will be available for the objects, and point clouds representing each object can be generated for comparison with the observed point clouds from the 3-D camera. It is not straightforward to use existing descriptors in this paper, as the point cloud from the CAD model and the observed point cloud may differ due to different viewpoints and potential occlusions. The method proposed in this paper is intended to be easy to apply to industrial assembly problems where there is a need for a robust estimation of the displacement of an object, either as a coarse estimate for use in grasping or as an initial guess to use in fine registration for demanding assembly operations with close tolerances. The method exploits the curvature of the point clouds to accurately describe the surrounding surface of each point. This method serves as a basis for future industrial implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aligning 2.5D views has been extensively explored in the past decades, where most prior works have concentrated on object data with complex structures. This paper presents a method to align real-word scene scans with challenging features such as noise, poor geometric information, and highly repeatable patterns. Our method consists of two modules: pairwise and multiview alignments. Key to the proposed pairwise alignment method is the rotational contour signature geometric feature and voting-based correspondence selection algorithm. The former promises strong discriminative power for 2.5D scene data, while the latter affords high-quality correspondences via a voting process for all raw feature matches using L2 distance and point pair affinity constraints. For the multiview alignment method, we first use a connected graph algorithm to establish the connections of all 2.5D views for coarse merging; then, we propose a shape-growing iterative closest point algorithm for further refinement. Experiments are conducted on scene point cloud datasets addressing both the indoor and outdoor scenarios, whereby we demonstrate that the proposed pairwise alignment method clearly outperforms the state of the art. Moreover, the proposed multiview alignment method manages to put multiple unordered 2.5D scene fragments into a unified coordinate system automatically, accurately, and efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rigid registration is a fundamental process in many applications that require alignment of different datasets. Iterative closest point (ICP) is a widely used algorithm that iteratively finds point correspondences and updates the rigid transformation. One of the key variants of ICP to its success is the selection of points, which is directly related to the convergence and robustness of the ICP algorithm. Besides uniform sampling, there are a number of normal-based and feature-based approaches that consider normal, curvature, and/or other signals in the point selection. Among them, normal-space sampling (NSS) is one of the most popular techniques due to its simplicity and low computational cost. The rationale of NSS is to sample enough constraints to determine all the components of transformation, but this paper finds that NSS actually can constrain the translational normal space only. This paper extends the fundamental idea of NSS and proposes Dual NSS (DNSS) to sample points in both translational and rotational normal spaces. Compared with NSS, this approach has similar simplicity and efficiency without any need of additional information, but has a much better effectiveness. Experimental results show that DNSS can outperform the normal-based and feature-based methods in terms of convergence and robustness. For example, DNSS can achieve convergence from an orthogonal initial position while no other methods can achieve. Note to Practitioners—ICP is commonly used to align different data to a same coordination system. While NSS is often used to speed up the alignment process by down-sampling the data uniformly in the normal space. The implementation of NSS only has three steps: 1) construct a set of buckets in the normal-space; 2) put all points of the data into buckets based on their normal direction; and 3) uniformly pick points from all the buckets until the desired number of points is selected. The algorithm is simple and fast, so that it is still the common practice. However, the weakness of NSS comes from the reason that it cannot handle rotational uncertainties. In this paper, a new algorithm called DNSS is developed to constrain both translation and rotation at the same time by introducing a dual-normal space. With a new definition of the normal space, the algorithm complexity of DNSS is the same as that of NSS, and it can be readily implemented in all types of application that are currently using ICP. The experimental results show that DNSS has better efficiency, quality, and reliability than both normal-based and feature-based methods have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an efficient method to deal with the matching and registration problem found in cross-source point clouds captured by different types of sensors. This task is especially challenging due to the presence of density variation, scale difference, a large proportion of noise and outliers, missing data, and viewpoint variation. The proposed method has two stages: in the coarse matching stage, we use the ensemble of shape functions descriptor to select potential K regions from the candidate point clouds for the target. In the fine stage, we propose a scale embedded generative Gaussian mixture models registration method to refine the results from the coarse matching stage. Following the fine stage, both the best region and accurate camera pose relationships between the candidates and target are found. We conduct experiments in which we apply the method to two applications: one is 3D object detection and localization in street-view outdoor (LiDAR/VSFM) cross-source point clouds and the other is 3D scene matching and registration in indoor (KinectFusion/VSFM) cross-source point clouds. The experiment results show that the proposed method performs well when compared with the existing methods. It also shows that the proposed method is robust under various sensing techniques, such as LiDAR, Kinect, and RGB camera. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D Human shape tracking consists in fitting a template model to temporal sequences of visual observations. It usually comprises an association step, that finds correspondences between the model and the input data, and a deformation step, that fits the model to the observations given correspondences. Most current approaches follow the Iterative-Closest-Point (ICP) paradigm, where the association step is carried out by searching for the nearest neighbors. It fails when large deformations occur and errors in the association tend to propagate over time. In this paper, we propose a discriminative alternative for the association, that leverages random forests to infer correspondences in one shot. Regardless the choice of shape parameterizations, being surface or volumetric meshes, we convert 3D shapes to volumetric distance fields and thereby design features to train the forest. We investigate two ways to draw volumetric samples: voxels of regular grids and cells from Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation (CVT). While the former consumes considerable memory and in turn limits us to learn only subject-specific correspondences, the latter yields much less memory footprint by compactly tessellating the interior space of a shape with optimal discretization. This facilitates the use of larger cross-subject training databases, generalizes to different human subjects and hence results in less overfitting and better detection. The discriminative correspondences are successfully integrated to both surface and volumetric deformation frameworks that recover human shape poses, which we refer to as ‘tracking-by-detection of 3D human shapes.’ It allows for large deformations and prevents tracking errors from being accumulated. When combined with ICP for refinement, it proves to yield better accuracy in registration and more stability when tracking over time. Evaluations on existing datasets demonstrate the benefits with respect to the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of registering multiple point sets. Solutions to this problem are often approximated by repeatedly solving for pairwise registration, which results in an uneven treatment of the sets forming a pair: a model set and a data set. The main drawback of this strategy is that the model set may contain noise and outliers, which negatively affects the estimation of the registration parameters. In contrast, the proposed formulation treats all the point sets on an equal footing. Indeed, all the points are drawn from a central Gaussian mixture, hence the registration is cast into a clustering problem. We formally derive batch and incremental EM algorithms that robustly estimate both the GMM parameters and the rotations and translations that optimally align the sets. Moreover, the mixture's means play the role of the registered set of points while the variances provide rich information about the contribution of each component to the alignment. We thoroughly test the proposed algorithms on simulated data and on challenging real data collected with range sensors. We compare them with several state-of-the-art algorithms, and we show their potential for surface reconstruction from depth data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a novel approach based on spectral geometry to quantify and visualize non-isometric deformations of 3D surfaces by mapping two manifolds. The proposed method can determine multi-scale, non-isometric deformations through the variation of Laplace-Beltrami spectrum of two shapes. Given two triangle meshes, the spectra can be varied from one to another with a scale function defined on each vertex. The variation is expressed as a linear interpolation of eigenvalues of the two shapes. In each iteration step, a quadratic programming problem is constructed, based on our derived spectrum variation theorem and smoothness energy constraint, to compute the spectrum variation. The derivation of the scale function is the solution of such a problem. Therefore, the final scale function can be solved by integral of the derivation from each step, which, in turn, quantitatively describes non-isometric deformations between two shapes. To evaluate the method, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic and real data. We employ real epilepsy patient imaging data to quantify the shape variation between the left and right hippocampi in epileptic brains. In addition, we use longitudinal Alzheimer data to compare the shape deformation of diseased and healthy hippocampus. In order to show the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method, we also compare it with spatial registration-based methods, e.g., non-rigid Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and voxel-based method. These experiments demonstrate the advantages of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spin image is a powerful shape descriptor, useful in a point set or surface registration. However, the usage of spin images is hampered by issues such as sensitivity to noise and sampling rate and time-consuming matching process. We propose a novel spin-image-based local surface descriptor named spin contour to alleviate these problems. This descriptor is not an image but a 2-D point set. Comparisons show that the spin contour is robust to noise and sampling differences. The matching time is also improved over spin images. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Robotic grinding is a promising technique to generate the final shape of blades. It can relieve human from participating in dirty and noisy environments, improve product quality, and lower production costs. One important task in robotic grinding is 3-D shape matching. However, existing matching methods do not consider the requirements associated with different grinding allowances, which can potentially lead to an unstable grinding force. This paper proposes a novel shape matching method for robotic grinding. The goal is to define a new objective function considering different allowance weights for stable grinding, and address incorrect shape matching from the missing points or uneven density points. The main contribution of this paper is the application of variance minimization to construct an objective function, from which the required shape matching parameters are iteratively calculated. This method balances the contributions of all the measured points, weighs the allowances for the pressure and suction surfaces of a blade, and avoids incorrect matching tendencies for high-density points. It is advantageous to maintaining a relatively stable grinding force. The effectiveness of this method is verified through simulations and scanning/grinding experiments of different blades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Charge pumping (CP) has proved itself to be one of the most utilitarian methods to quantify defects in MOS devices. In the presence of low-to-moderate gate leakage, CP quantification is most often implemented via a series of measurements at multiple frequencies. However, this approach is ill-equipped to handle excessive leakage currents common in advanced technologies. In this paper, we transform multifrequency CP from a quasi-dc measurement into a true ac measurement. This ac detection scheme, called frequency-modulated CP, is far better equipped to deal with high levels of leakage currents and thereby extends the usefulness of CP to current and future device technologies where excessive leakage is the norm. Additionally, we show that multifrequency CP has a long overlooked error that becomes significant in high-leakage situations. We discuss the origins of this error in detail and outline mitigation methodologies. Finally, we explore timing and voltage limitations of waveform generators and how these experimental boundary conditions impact on both frequency-dependent and FMCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Range image registration is a fundamental research topic for 3D object modeling and recognition. In this paper, we propose an accurate and robust algorithm for pairwise and multi-view range image registration. We first extract a set of Rotational Projection Statistics (RoPS) features from a pair of range images, and perform feature matching between them. The two range images are then registered using a transformation estimation method and a variant of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. Based on the pairwise registration algorithm, we propose a shape growing based multi-view registration algorithm. The seed shape is initialized with a selected range image and then sequentially updated by performing pairwise registration between itself and the input range images. All input range images are iteratively registered during the shape growing process. Extensive experiments were conducted to test the performance of our algorithm. The proposed pairwise registration algorithm is accurate, and robust to small overlaps, noise and varying mesh resolutions. The proposed multi-view registration algorithm is also very accurate. Rigorous comparisons with the state-of-the-art show the superiority of our algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports a novel method for deformable registration of digital anatomical surfaces. The method capitalizes upon the iterative local affine iterative closest point (ICP) approach that applies an affine transformation per surface vertex along with a regularization constraint to force neighboring surface vertices to undergo similar transformations. More robust vertex correspondence with respect to simple closest point was obtained by exploiting local shape similarity metrics, which includes vertex distance, surface normal, and local curvature. The local curvature was mean shifted at run-time, during the iterative optimization, to make the point correspondence process less dependent upon the surface noise and resolution. The experimental validation was performed on three surface datasets (femur, hemi-pelvic bone, and liver). The registration results showed that the proposed method outperforms, across all the three surface datasets (rmse: 0.19 mm, 0.30 mm, 0.61 mm), global affine ICP (rmse: 2.89 mm, 3.95 mm, and 8.30 mm), local affine ICP (rmse: 0.31 mm, 1.61 mm, and 1.63 mm) and coherent point drift (rmse: 1.99 mm, 2.39 mm, and 4.78 mm) methods. As a whole, the mean-shifted curvature increased the registration accuracy by about 20%. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a framework for protein-protein docking is proposed, which exploits both shape and physicochemical complementarity to generate improved docking predictions. Shape complementarity is achieved by matching local surface patches. However, unlike existing approaches, which are based on single-patch or two-patch matching, we developed a new algorithm that compares simultaneously, groups of neighboring patches from the receptor with groups of neighboring patches from the ligand. Taking into account the fact that shape complementarity in protein surfaces is mostly approximate rather than exact, the proposed group-based matching algorithm fits perfectly to the nature of protein surfaces. This is demonstrated by the high performance that our method achieves especially in the case where the unbound structures of the proteins are considered. Additionally, several physicochemical factors, such as desolvation energy, electrostatic complementarity (EC), hydrophobicity (HP), Coulomb potential (CP), and Lennard-Jones potential are integrated using an optimized scoring function, improving geometric ranking in more than 60 percent of the complexes of Docking Benchmark 2.4. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent radar satellites like TerraSAR-X and COSMO-SkyMed deliver very high resolution synthetic aperture radar images at a spatial resolution of less than 1 m. Persistent scatterer (PS) positions obtained from stacks of high-resolution spotlight data show very much details of buildings and other structures in 3-D due to the enormous amount of PS obtainable from data of this resolution class. As soon as more than one stack covering the same area is available, a combination of the results is eligible. However, geocoded PSs cannot be simply united due to residual offsets in their absolute positions which stem from unknown absolute height values of the different reference points chosen when processing the individual stacks independently. In this letter, two different methods for a geometrical fusion of geocoded PSs from stacks acquired at different aspect and incidence angles are presented. The algorithms are applied to PS interferometry results of both urban and nonurban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present a probabilistic spatial approach to build compact 3-D representations of unknown objects probed by tactile sensors. Our approach exploits the high frame rates provided by modern tactile sensors and utilizes Kalman filters to build a probabilistic model of the contact point cloud that is efficiently stored in a kd-tree. The quality of generated shape representations is compared with a naive averaging approach, and we show that our method provides superior accuracy. We also evaluate the feasibility of object classification combining the generated object representations, together with the iterative closest point algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plasma etching at sub-3x-nm nodes requires inductively coupled plasma (ICP) reactors to work within tight uniformity constraints. The characteristic donut shape of the ICPs is, however, visible on the wafer in a 20–60 mTorr range due to reduced plasma diffusion. Phase shifting of the coil currents in an ICP source has been used to improve plasma uniformity. Images of plasma properties with and without phase shift of coil currents are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a novel method to solve shape alignment problems. We use gray-scale "images” to represent source shapes, and propose a novel two-component Gaussian Mixture (GM) distance map representation for target shapes. This asymmetric representation is a flexible image-based representation which is able to represent different kinds of shape data, including continuous contours, unstructured sparse point sets, edge maps, and even gray-scale gradient maps. Using this representation, a new energy function based on a novel two-component Gaussian Mixture distance model is proposed. The new energy function was empirically evaluated to be a more robust shape dissimilarity metric that can be computed efficiently. Such high efficiency is essential for global optimization methods. We adopt and modify one of them, the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), to effectively estimate the global optimum of the new energy function. Differently from the original PSO, several new strategies were employed to make the optimization more robust and prevent it from converging prematurely. The overall performance of the proposed framework as well as the properties of each algorithmic component were evaluated and compared with those of some state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments and comparison performed on generalized 2D and 3D shape data demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of the method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For accurate registration of overlapping free form shapes, different points in one shape must select different points in another as their most sensible correspondents. To reach this ideal state, in this paper we develop a novel algorithm to penalize those points in one shape that select the same closest point in another as their tentative correspondents. The novel algorithm then models the relative weight change over time of a tentative correspondence as the difference between the negative functions of the numbers of points in one shape that actually and ideally select the same closest point in another. Such modeling results in an optimal estimation of the weights of different tentative correspondences, in the sense of deterministic annealing, that lead the camera motion parameters to be estimated in the weighted least squares sense. The proposed algorithm is initialized using the pure translational motion derived from the centroids difference of the overlapping free form shapes being registered. Experimental results show that it outperforms three selected state-of-the-art algorithms on the whole for the accurate and robust registration of real overlapping free form shapes captured using two different laser scanners under typical imaging conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a relaxation labeling process with the newly defined compatibility measure for solving a general nonrigid point matching problem. In the literature, there exists a point matching method using relaxation labeling; however, the compatibility coefficient takes a binary value of zero or one depending on whether a point and a neighbor have corresponding points. Our approach generalizes this relaxation labeling method. The compatibility coefficient takes n-discrete values which measure the correlation between point pairs. In order to improve the speed of the algorithm, we use a diagram of log distance and polar angle bins to compute the correlation. The extensive experiments show that the proposed topology preserving relaxation algorithm significantly improves the matching performance compared to other state-of-the-art point matching algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new 3D face recognition approach, Collective Shape Difference Classifier (CSDC), to meet practical application requirements, i.e., high recognition performance, high computational efficiency, and easy implementation. We first present a fast posture alignment method which is self-dependent and avoids the registration between an input face against every face in the gallery. Then, a Signed Shape Difference Map (SSDM) is computed between two aligned 3D faces as a mediate representation for the shape comparison. Based on the SSDMs, three kinds of features are used to encode both the local similarity and the change characteristics between facial shapes. The most discriminative local features are selected optimally by boosting and trained as weak classifiers for assembling three collective strong classifiers, namely, CSDCs with respect to the three kinds of features. Different schemes are designed for verification and identification to pursue high performance in both recognition and computation. The experiments, carried out on FRGC v2 with the standard protocol, yield three verification rates all better than 97.9 percent with the FAR of 0.1 percent and rank-1 recognition rates above 98 percent. Each recognition against a gallery with 1,000 faces only takes about 3.6 seconds. These experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is not only effective but also time efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]