Automated registration of terrain range images using surface feature level sets

摘要

A method for registering terrain range images is described. A smooth surface is fit to range data to provide a continuous mapping to second order surface intrinsics. Level sets of such intrinsics are found as features. These features enable two accurate means of comparison: arclength and a circular correlation of the distance from the discrete points on the level set to its centroid. These two methods of feature matching allow a matching algorithm with computational complexity O(N log N). The solution of the transformation from the matches employs a weighted least squares technique and removes matching errors by cross validation. The method is tested on simulated range images and results are given.