Novel surface registration using the grid closest point (GCP) transform

A novel approach has been developed for fast registration of two sets of 3-D curves or surfaces. The technique is an extension of Besl and Mackay´s (1992) iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. This technique solves the computational complexity associated with the ICP algorithm by applying a novel grid closest point (GCP) transform and a genetic algorithm to minimize the cost function. A detailed description of the algorithm is presented along with a comparison of its performance versus several registration techniques. Two applications are presented in this paper. In the first, the algorithm is used to register 2-D head contours extracted from CT/MRI data to correct for possible mis-alignment caused by motion artifacts during scanning. In the second, the algorithm is used to register 3-D segments of the human jaw obtained using the shape from shading technique. Registration using the GCP/GA technique is found to be significantly faster and of comparable accuracy than two popular techniques in the computer vision and medical imaging literature