Alignment of 3D models

In this paper we present a new method for alignment of 3D models. This approach is based on two types of symmetries of the models: the reflective symmetry and the local translational symmetry along a direction. Inspired by the work on the principal component analysis (PCA), we select the best optimal alignment axes within the PCA-axes, the plane reflection symmetry being used as a selection criterion. This pre-processing transforms the alignment problem into an indexing scheme based on the number of the retained PCA-axes. In order to capture the local translational symmetry of a shape along a direction, we introduce a new measure we call the local translational invariance cost (LTIC). The mirror planes of a model are also used to reduce the number of candidate coordinate frames when looking for the one which corresponds to the user's perception. Experimental results show that the proposed method finds the rotation that best aligns a 3D mesh. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.