Free-form object recognition and registration using surface signatures

This paper presents a new concept for 3-D free-form surface registration and object recognition using a new surface representation scheme. This representation scheme captures the 3-D curvature information of any free-form surface and encodes it into a 2-D image corresponding to a certain point on the surface. This image is unique for this point and is independent from the object translation or orientation in space. For this reason we called this image “Surface Point Signature” (SPS). This scheme can be used as a global representation of the surface as well as a local one and also in a scale independent surface matching. It performs faster registration than existing registration approaches. We applied this technique in object registration, multimodal medical image registration and the recognition of multiple objects in a 3-D scene.