Hierarchical Skull Registration Method with a Bounded Rotation Angle

To reconstruct the appearance of an unknown skull based on knowledge, the most similar skull should be retrieved from the skull Database. The process is called skull registration. A hierarchical skull registration method with bounded rotation angle is proposed in this paper. The surface of the skull is divided into concave or convex regions by K-means. The optimal 3D transform is searched for each potential pair of matched feature regions approximately to align the skulls roughly. And then the novel ICP (Iterative Closest Point) algorithm with a bounded rotation angle (BRA-ICP) is applied for fine registration. To show the generality, the proposed algorithm is applied not only for skull registration but also for the public data registration. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can achieve better registration accuracy and higher iterative convergence speed in the fine registration stage and the entire process is completed without human intervention.