Registration of multi-view point sets under the perspective of expectation-maximization

Multi-view registration plays a critical role in 3D model reconstruction. To solve this problem, most previous methods align point sets by either partially exploring available information or blindly utilizing unnecessary information, which may lead to undesired results or extra computation complexity. Accordingly, we propose a novel solution for the multi-view registration under the perspective of Expectation-Maximization (EM). The proposed method assumes that each data point is generated from one unique Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), where its corresponding points in other point sets are regarded as Gaussian centroids with equal covariance and membership probabilities. As it is difficult to obtain real corresponding points in the registration problem, they are approximated by the nearest neighbor in each other aligned point sets. Based on this assumption, it is reasonable to define the likelihood function including all rigid transformations, which require to be estimated for multi-view registration. Subsequently, the EM algorithm is derived to estimate rigid transformations with one Gaussian covariance by maximizing the likelihood function. Since the GMM component number is automatically determined by the number of point sets, there is no trade-off between registration accuracy and efficiency in the proposed method. Finally, the proposed method is tested on several benchmark data sets and compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance on the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness for multi-view registration.