Morphological techniques in the iterative closest point algorithm

This paper describes a method for the accurate and computationally efficient registration of 3-D shapes. The method is based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm and improves it by dramatically decreasing the computational cost of the algorithm´s most inefficient step, namely the implementation of the closest point operator. The decrease is achieved with the help of a 3-D volume containing the points to be registered. Prior to the implementation of the ICP algorithm, the Voronoi diagram of the “model” points is constructed in the volume, by means of the morphological Voronoi tesselation method with respect to the Euclidean distance metric. The use of the tesselated volume renders the calculation of the closest point operator extremely fast and speeds up the ICP algorithm tremendously