3D rotation estimation using discrete spherical harmonic oscillator transforms

This paper presents an approach to 3D rotation estimation using discrete spherical harmonic oscillator transforms (discrete SHOTs). Discrete SHOTs not only have simple and fast implementation methods but also are compatible with the existing angle estimation algorithms related to spherical harmonics. Discrete SHOTs of the rotated signal follow the same formulation to the Wigner-D matrix as spherical harmonics transforms. Thus, the spherical harmonics related algorithms could be utilized to discrete SHOTs without modification. Furthermore, compared to some existing methods, our approach with discrete SHOTs exhibits higher accuracy, higher precision and improved robustness to noise if the input signal is sampled uniformly on Cartesian grids. The phenomenon results from no interpolations in discrete SHOTs.