Automatic crude patch registration: Toward automatic 3D model building

Three-dimensional shape models are often put together from several partial reconstructions. There are good algorithms available to perform the necessary, precise registration automatically, but only after the partial reconstructions have been brought into approximate positions. Providing the initial crude positions is often done manually. This paper proposes a technique to compute these initial positions automatically. The development of this automatic crude registration has allowed us to create a system that can generate complex 3D models from a set of partial reconstructions without any user intervention or prior knowledge of relative positions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).