Partial surface and volume matching in three dimensions

In this paper we present a new technique for partial surface and volume matching of images in three dimensions. In this problem, we are given two objects in 3-space, each represented as a set of points, scattered uniformly along its boundary or inside its volume. The goal is to find a rigid motion of one object which makes a sufficiently large portion of its boundary lying sufficiently close to a corresponding portion of the boundary of the second object. Our method treats separately the rotation and the translation components of the Euclidean motion that we seek, and compares favorably with previous techniques. Experimental results on various examples, involving data from industrial applications and from molecular biology, are presented and show the accurate performance of our algorithm.