Registration of multi-view point sets under the perspective of expectation-maximization

Registration of multi-view point sets is a prerequisite for 3D model reconstruction. To solve this problem, most of previous approaches either partially explore available information or blindly utilize unnecessary information to align each point set, which may lead to the undesired results or introduce extra computation complexity. To this end, this paper consider the multi-view registration problem as a maximum likelihood estimation problem and proposes a novel multi-view registration approach under the perspective of Expectation-Maximization (EM). The basic idea of our approach is that different data points are generated by the same number of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs). For each data point in one point set, its nearest neighbors can be searched from other well-aligned point sets. Then, we can suppose this data point is generated by the special GMM, which is composed of each nearest neighbor adhered with one Gaussian distribution. Based on this assumption, it is reasonable to define the likelihood function including all rigid transformations, which requires to be estimated for multi-view registration. Subsequently, the EM algorithm is utilized to maximize the likelihood function so as to estimate all rigid transformations. Finally, the proposed approach is tested on several bench mark data sets and compared with some state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results illustrate its super performance on accuracy, robustness and efficiency for the registration of multi-view point sets.