A method for fine registration of multiple view range images considering the measurement error properties

This paper presents a new method for fine registration of two range images from different viewpoints that have been roughly registered. Our method deals with the properties of the measurement error of the range image data. The error distribution is different for each point in the image and is usually dependent on both the viewing direction and the distance to the object surface. We find the best transformation of two range images to align each measured point and reconstruct 3D total object shape by taking such properties of the measurement error into account. The position of each measured point is corrected according to the variance and the extent of the distribution of its measurement error. The best transformation is selected by the evaluation of the effectiveness of this correction of every measured point. The experiments showed that our method produced better results than the conventional ICP method. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).