Improvement of affine iterative closest point algorithm for partial registration

In this study, partial registration problem with outliers and missing data in the affine case is discussed. To solve this problem, a novel objective function is proposed based on bidirectional distance and trimmed strategy, and then a new affine trimmed iterative closest point algorithm is given. First, when bidirectional distance measurement is applied, the ill-posed partial registration problem in the affine case is prevented. Second, the overlapping percentage is solved by using trimmed strategy which uses as many correct overlapping points as possible. The authors’ method computes the affine transformation, correspondence and overlapping percentage automatically at each iterative step. In this way, it handles partially overlapping registration with outliers and missing data in the affine case well. Experimental results demonstrate that their method is more robust and precise than the state-of-the-art algorithms. It also has good convergence and similar running time with traditional algorithms.