centroids to the data by maximizing the likelihood. At the
optimum, the point sets become aligned and the correspon-
dence is obtained using the posterior probabilities of the
GMM components. Core to our method is forcing GMM
centroids to move coherently as a group, which preserves the
topological structure of the point sets. We impose the
coherence constraint by explicit reparameterization of
GMM centroid locations (for rigid and affine transforma-
tions) or by regularization of the displacement field (for
smooth nonrigid transformation). We also show how the
computational complexity of the method can be reduced to
linear, which makes it applicable for large data sets. The rest
of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we overview
the current rigid and nonrigid point set registration methods
and state our contributions. In Section 3, we formulate a
probabilistic point set registration framework. In Sections 4
and 5, we describe our algorithms for rigid, affine, and
nonrigid registration cases, and relate them to existing works.
In Section 6, we discuss the computational complexity of the
method and introduce its fast implementation. In Section 7,
we evaluate the performance of our algorithm. Section 8
concludes with some discussions.
2PREVIOUS WORK
Many algorithms exist for rigid and for nonrigid point set
registration. They aim to recover the correspondence or the
transformation required to align the point sets or both. Many
algorithms involve a dual-step update, iteratively alternat-
ing between the correspondence and the transformation
estimation. Here, we briefly overview the rigid and nonrigid
point set registration methods and state our contributions.
2.1 Rigid Point Set Registration Methods
The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm, introduced by
Besl and McKay [1] and Zhang [2], is the most popular
method for rigid point set registration due to its simplicity
and low computational complexity. ICP iteratively assigns
correspondences based on the closest distance criterion and
finds the least-squares rigid transformation relating the two
point sets. The algorithm then redetermines the correspon-
dences and continues until it reaches the local minimum.
Many variants of ICP have been proposed that affect all
phases of the algorithm from the selection and matching of
points to the minimization strategy [3], [4]. ICP requires that
the initial position of the two point sets be adequately close.
To overcome the ICP limitations, many probabilistic
methods were developed [5], [6]. These methods use
soft assignment of correspondences that establishes
correspondences between all combinations of points
according to some probability which generalizes the
binary assignment of correspondences in ICP. Among
these methods are the Robust Point Matching (RPM)
algorithm introduced by Gold et al. [7], and its later
variants [5], [8]. In [9], it was shown that, in RPM,
alternating soft assignment of correspondences and trans-
formation is equivalent to the Expectation Maximization
(EM) algorithm for GMM, where one point set is treated as
GMM centroids with equal isotropic covariances and the
other point set is treated as data points. In fact, several rigid
point set methods, including Joshi and Lee [10], Wells [11],
Cross and Hancock [12], Luo and Hancock [6], [13], McNeill
and Vijayakumar [14], explicitly formulate point set regis-
tration as a maximum likelihood (ML) estimation problem
to fit the GMM centroids to the data points. These methods
reparameterize GMM centroids by a set of rigid transfor-
mation parameters (translation and rotation). The EM
algorithm used for optimization of the likelihood function
consists of two steps: E-step to compute the probabilities
and M-step to update the transformation. Common to such
probabilistic methods is the inclusion of an extra distribu-
tion term to account for outliers (e.g., large Gaussian [5] or
uniform distribution [11]) and deterministic annealing on
the Gaussian width to avoid poor local minima. These
probabilistic methods perform better than conventional
ICP, especially in the presence of noise and outliers.
Another class of rigid point set registration methods is
the spectral m ethods. Scott and Longuet-Higgins [15]
introduced a noniterative algorithm to associate points of
two arbitrary patterns, e xploiting some properties of
Gaussian proximity matrix (Gram matrix) of point sets.
The algorithm works well with translation, shearing, and
scaling deformations, but performs poorly with nonrigid
transformations. Li and Hartley showed that correspon-
dence and transformation are two factors of Gram matrices
that can be found iteratively using Newton-Schulz factor-
ization [16]. This method performs well for moderate linear
transformations. In spite of its elegance, the large computa-
tional effort required for spectral methods prohibits its wide
applicability. There are a few other nonspectral methods
worth mentioning. Ho et al. [17] proposed an elegant
noniterative algorithm for 2D affine registration by search-
ing for the roots of the associated polynomials. Unfortu-
nately, this method does not generalize to higher
dimensions. Belongie et al. [18] introduced the “shape
context” descriptor, which incorporates the neighborhood
structure of the point set and thus helps to recover the
correspondence between the point sets.
Our approach to the rigid point set registration is
probabilistic and most closely related to the works of
Rangarajan et al. [5], Wells [11], and Luo and Hancock [13].
Despite extensive work in rigid probabilistic registration,
none of the methods, to the best of our knowledge, provides
a closed form solution to the maximization step (M-step) of
the EM algorithm for a general multidimensional case. The
fact that the rotation matrix should be constrained to be
orthogonal and to have a positive determinant further
complicates its estimation. Rangarajan et al. [5] showed the
solution for the 2D case only, where rotation is parameter-
ized by a single angle. In higher dimensions, the closed
MYRONENKO AND SONG: POINT SET REGISTRATION: COHERENT POINT DRIFT 2263
Fig. 1. The point set registration problem: Given two sets of points,
assign the correspondences and the transformation that maps one point
set to the other.