Iterative 3D Point-Set Registration Based on Hierarchical Vertex Signature (HVS)

Robust 3D point registration is difficult for biomedical surfaces, especially for roundish and approximate symmetric soft tissues such as liver, stomach, etc. We present an Iterative Optimization Registration scheme (IOR) based on Hierarchical Vertex Signatures (HVS) between point-sets of medical surfaces. HVSs are distributions of concatenated neighborhood angles relative to the PCA axes of the surfaces which concisely describe global structures and local contexts around vertices in a hierarchical paradigm. The correspondences between point-sets are then established by Chi-Square test statistics. Specifically, to alleviate the sensitivity to axes directions that often affects robustness for other global axes based algorithms, IOR aligns surfaces gradually, and incrementally calibrates the directions of major axes in a multi-resolution manner. The experimental results demonstrate IOR is efficient and robust for liver registration. This method is also promising to other applications such as morphological pathological analysis, 3D model retrieval and object recognition.