A two-stage approach to align two surfaces of deformable objects

•Align two partial overlapping surfaces of deformable objects.•Deformation is divided into a single global rigid motion and local deformations.•Combine probability approach and geometry approach to avoid deformation assumptions.

This paper introduces a new approach for non-rigid registration which is able to align two surfaces under large deformation. At the first stage, the two surfaces are remeshed to create two sub-meshes. Then, correspondences between the two sub-meshes are obtained by employing a robust probabilistic method. Reliable correspondences are used to find a global rigid transformation to bring the two surfaces closer. Using these correspondences and taking one sub-mesh as a deformation graph, the second stage applies a deformation model to align the two surfaces together. This stage solves for more correct correspondences as well as for a local transformation at each node simultaneously. With these two stages, the method deals robustly with large motion and preserves small details during the alignment process of the two surfaces. The efficiency of the method is demonstrated by comparing the alignment results it achieves with the results obtained by state-of-the-art methods.

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