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The computation of a rigid body transformation which optimally aligns a set of measurement points with a surface and related registration problems are studied from the viewpoint of geometry and optimization.We provide a convergence analysis for widely used registration algorithms such as ICP, using either closest points (Besl and McKay [2]) or tangent planes at closest points (Chen and Medioni [4]), and for a recently developed approach based on quadratic approximants of the squared distance function [24]. ICP based on closest points exhibits local linear convergence only. Its counterpart which minimizes squared distances to the tangent planes at closest points is a Gauss-Newton iteration; it achieves local quadratic convergence for a zero residual problem and - if enhanced by regularization and step size control - comes close to quadratic convergence in many realistic scenarios. Quadratically convergent algorithms are based on the approach in [24]. The theoretical results are supported by a number of experiments; there, we also compare the algorithms with respect to global convergence behavior, stability and running time.

Registration, Convergence Analysis, ICP