An efficient and robust algorithm for parallel groupwise registration of bone surfaces

In this paper a novel groupwise registration algorithm is proposed for the unbiased registration of a large number of densely sampled point clouds. The method fits an evolving mean shape to each of the example point clouds thereby minimizing the total deformation. The registration algorithm alternates between a computationally expensive, but parallelizable, deformation step of the mean shape to each example shape and a very inexpensive step updating the mean shape. The algorithm is evaluated by comparing it to a state of the art registration algorithm. Bone surfaces of wrists, segmented from CT data with a voxel size of 0.3 x 0.3 x 0.3 mm3, serve as an example test set. The negligible bias and registration error of about 0.12 mm for the proposed algorithm are similar to those in. However, current point cloud registration algorithms usually have computational and memory costs that increase quadratically with the number of point clouds, whereas the proposed algorithm has linearly increasing costs, allowing the registration of a much larger number of shapes: 48 versus 8, on the hardware used.