Free form surface matching using motion consistency

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to evaluate the possible point matches established by the traditional ICP algorithm in the process of matching two overlapping free form surfaces represented as two sets of unorganised points. While the existing methods mainly use feature matching to establish or evaluate possible correspondences between the surfaces to be matched, our novel approach applies motion consistency to evaluate the possible correspondences. In particular, while the existing methods assume that satisfying local structural constraints is a necessary condition for a pair of points to represent a real correspondence, our novel approach proves that satisfying global rigid motion constraints is a sufficient condition. A comparative study based on real images has shown that the proposed algorithm is accurate and robust for the matching of overlapping free form surfaces.