Robust affine iterative closest point algorithm with bidirectional distance

This study proposes a robust affine iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm based on bidirectional distance for the registration of m-dimensional (m-D) point sets. Since the affine registration problem can be formulated as a least square (LS) problem by incorporating an affine transformation, this study first analyses the ill-posed problem of the affine registration and turn it into well-posed one by introducing the bidirectional distance into the LS formulation. Then, the corresponding affine ICP algorithm is proposed to solve the well-posed problem. By using the bidirectional distance, the proposed algorithm can directly estimate the affine transformation and converge monotonically to a local minimum from any given initial parameters. To obtain the desired global minimum, good initial parameters can be estimated by independent component analysis (ICA) technique. The proposed approach makes no geometric assumptions on point sets, so it is a general framework for affine registration of m-D point sets. Experimental results demonstrate its robustness and accuracy compared with the current state-of-the-art approaches.