Novel surface registration using the grid closest point (GCP) transform
A novel approach has been developed for fast registration of two sets of 3-D curves or surfaces. The technique is an extension of Besl and Mackay's (1992) iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. This technique solves the computational complexity associated with the ICP algorithm by applying a novel grid closest point (GCP) transform and a genetic algorithm to minimize the cost function. A detailed description of the algorithm is presented along with a comparison of its performance versus several registration techniques. Two applications are presented in this paper. In the first, the algorithm is used to register 2-D head contours extracted from CT/MRI data to correct for possible mis-alignment caused by motion artifacts during scanning. In the second, the algorithm is used to register 3-D segments of the human jaw obtained using the shape from shading technique. Registration using the GCP/GA technique is found to be significantly faster and of comparable accuracy than two popular techniques in the computer vision and medical imaging literature.