Multiple Kernel Point Set Registration

The finite Gaussian mixture model with kernel correlation is a flexible tool that has recently received attention for point set registration. While there are many algorithms for point set registration presented in the literature, an important issue arising from these studies concerns the mapping of data with nonlinear relationships and the ability to select a suitable kernel. Kernel selection is crucial for effective point set registration. We focus here on multiple kernel point set registration. We make several contributions in this paper. First, each observation is modeled using the Student's t-distribution, which is heavily tailed and more robust than the Gaussian distribution. Second, by automatically adjusting the kernel weights, the proposed method allows us to prune the ineffective kernels. This makes the choice of kernels less crucial. After parameter learning, the kernel saliencies of the irrelevant kernels go to zero. Thus, the choice of kernels is less crucial and it is easy to include other kinds of kernels. Finally, we show empirically that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods recently proposed in the literature.