2013 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Robust Estimation of Nonrigid Transformation for Point Set Registration Jiayi Ma1,2, Ji Zhao3, Jinwen Tian1, Zhuowen Tu4, and Alan L. Yuille2 1Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2Department of Statistics, UCLA 3The Robotics Institute, CMU, 4Lab of Neuro Imaging, UCLA {jyma2010, zhaoji84, zhuowen.tu}@gmail.com,
[email protected],
[email protected] Abstract widely studied [5, 4, 7, 19, 14]. By contrast, nonrigid reg- istration is more difficult because the underlying nonrigid We present a new point matching algorithm for robust transformations are often unknown, complex, and hard to nonrigid registration. The method iteratively recovers the model [6]. But nonrigid registration is very important be- point correspondence and estimates the transformation be- cause it is required for many real world tasks including tween two point sets. In the first step of the iteration, fea- hand-written character recognition, shape recognition, de- ture descriptors such as shape context are used to establish formable motion tracking and medical image registration. rough correspondence. In the second step, we estimate the In this paper, we focus on the nonrigid case and present transformation using a robust estimator called L2E. This is a robust algorithm for nonrigid point set registration. There the main novelty of our approach and it enables us to deal are two unknown variables we have to solve for in this prob- with the noise and outliers which arise in the correspon- lem: the correspondence and the transformation. Although dence step. The transformation is specified in a functional solving for either variable without information regarding space, more specifically a reproducing kernel Hilbert space.