A Hierarchical Skull Point Cloud Registration Method

Abstract

Skull registration is one of the important steps in craniofacial reconstruction, and its registration accuracy and efficiency have an important impact on the reconstruction results. To solve the problem of low accuracy and efficiency of existing skull registration methods, a hierarchical skull point cloud registration method is proposed in this paper. The whole registration process is divided into a rough registration stage and a fine registration stage. Firstly, feature points are extracted from the pre-processed skull point cloud model, and a local coordinate reference system is established according to the feature points and their neighbor points. The improved spin image is used to construct the local feature descriptor. The feature matching is carried out according to the nearest neighbor algorithm, and the k-means algorithm is used to eliminate the mismatching points to achieve skull rough registration. Then, based on rough registration, we use an improved ICP algorithm to achieve fine registration of the skull. In this process, we use random sampling to reduce the search scale of points and add geometric feature constraints to further eliminate mismatched points. Finally, the whole registration algorithm is applied to the skull point cloud data to verify. The experimental results show that, compared with other methods, the registration effect and efficiency of the proposed method are superior to those of other methods. In order to verify the universality of the method, we also use a common data set for verification. Experiments show that the method is also very effective.

Keywords

• Skull registration
• spin image
• feature matching
• ICP algorithm
• random sampling
• geometric feature constraints