Determining correspondences and rigid motion of 3-D point sets with missing data

This paper addresses the general 3-D rigid motion problem, where the point correspondences and the motion parameters between two sets of 3-D points are to be recovered. The existence of missing points in the two sets is the most difficult problem. We first show a mathematical symmetry in the solutions of rotation parameters and point correspondences. A closed-form solution based on the correlation matrix eigenstructure decomposition is proposed for correspondence recovery with no missing points. Using a heuristic measure of point pair affinity derived from the eigenstructure, a weighted bipartite matching algorithm is developed to determine the correspondences in general cases where missing points occur. The use of the affinity heuristic also leads to a fast outlier removal algorithm, which can be run iteratively to refine the correspondence recovery. Simulation results and experiments on real images are shown in both ideal and general cases.