A robust and outlier-adaptive method for non-rigid point registration

In this paper, a flexible probabilistic method is introduced for non-rigid point registration, which is motivated by the pioneering research named Coherent Point Drift (CPD). Being different from CPD, our algorithm is robust and outlier-adaptive, which does not need prior information about data such as the appropriate outlier ratio when the point sets are perturbed by outliers. We consider the registration as the alignment of the data (one point set) to a set of Gaussian Mixture Model centroids (the other point set), and initially formulate it as maximizing the likelihood problem, then the problem is solved under Expectation–Maximization (EM) framework. The outlier ratio is also formulated in EM framework and will be updated during the EM iteration. Moreover, we use the volume of the point set region to determine the uniform distribution for modeling the outliers. The resulting registration algorithm exhibits inherent statistical robustness and has an explicit interpretation. The experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art method.