Fully automatic registration of multiple 3D data sets

This paper presents a method for automatically registering multiple rigid three dimensional (3D) data sets, a process we call multi-view surface matching. Previous approaches required manual registration or relied on specialized hardware to record the sensor position. In contrast, our method does not require any pose measuring hardware or manual intervention. We do not assume any knowledge of initial poses or which data sets overlap. Our multi-view surface matching algorithm begins by converting the input data into surface meshes, which are pair-wise registered using a surface matching engine. The resulting matches are tested for surface consistency, but some incorrect matches may be indistinguishable from correct ones at this local level. A global optimization process searches a graph constructed from the pair-wise matches for a connected sub-graph containing only correct matches, employing a global consistency measure to eliminate incorrect, but locally consistent, matches. From this sub-graph, the rigid-body transforms that register all the views can be computed directly. We apply our algorithm to the problem of 3D digital reconstruction of real-world objects and show results for a collection of automatically digitized objects. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.