Non-rigid range-scan alignment using thin-plate splines

We present a non-rigid alignment algorithm for aligning high-resolution range data in the presence of lowfrequency deformations, such as those caused by scanner calibration error. Traditional iterative closest points (ICP) algorithms, which rely on rigid-body alignment, fail in these cases because the error appears as a non-rigid warp in the data. Our algorithm combines the robustness and efficiency of ICP with the expressiveness of thin-plate splines to align high-resolution scanned data accurately, such as scans from the Digital Michelangelo Project 14. This application is distinguished from previous uses of the thin-plate spline by the fact that the resolution and size of warping are several orders of magnitude smaller than the extent of the mesh, thus requiring especially precise feature correspondence. 1.