A hierarchical method for 3D rigid motion estimation

We propose a hierarchical method for 3D rigid motion estimation between two 3D data sets of objects represented by triangular meshes. Multiresolution surfaces are generated from the original surface of each object. These surfaces are decomposed into small patches based on estimated geodesic distance and curvature information. In our method, segment-to-segment matching to recover rigid motions at each resolution level of surfaces is performed. Motion results from low resolution surface matching are propagated to higher resolution surface matching in order to generate a spatial constraint for similar segment selection. Our approach can recover 3D rigid motion of both rigid body and non-rigid body (with partial rigid areas). The method was tested to estimate rigid motions of 3D data obtained by the Cyberware scanner.