Accurate range image registration: Eliminating or modelling outliers

Automatic and accurate range image registration is often a prerequisite step for range image analysis and interpretation. Due to occlusion, appearance and disappearance of points in different images, outliers inevitably occur. In this case, various techniques to eliminate and model outliers have been proposed for accurate range image registration. The objective of this paper is to experimentally investigate which of the outlier elimination and modelling is more effective for the evaluation of possible correspondences established, so that a deep insight into how advanced range image registration algorithms will be developed can be obtained. The experimental results based on both synthetic data and real images show that the outlier modelling often outperforms the outlier elimination in the sense of producing more accurate and robust range image registration results.