Surface-to-surface registration using level sets

This paper presents a general approach for surface-to-surface registration (S2SR) with the Euclidean metric using signed distance maps. In addition, the method is symmetric such that the registration of a shape A to a shape B is identical to the registration of the shape B to the shape A. The S2SR problem can be approximated by the image registration (IR) problem of the signed distance maps (SDMs) of the surfaces confined to some narrow band.

By shrinking the narrow bands around the zero level sets the solution to the IR problem converges towards the S2SR problem. It is our hypothesis that this approach is more robust and less prone to fall into local minima than ordinary surface-to-surface registration. The IR problem is solved using the inverse compositional algorithm.

In this paper, a set of 40 pelvic bones of Duroc pigs are registered to each other w.r.t. the Euclidean transformation with both the S2SR approach and iterative closest point approach, and the results are compared.