A new algorithm for non-rigid point matching

We present a new robust point matching algorithm (RPM) that can jointly estimate the correspondence and non-rigid transformations between two point-sets that may be of different sizes. The algorithm utilizes the soft assign for the correspondence and the thin-plate spline for the non-rigid mapping. Embedded within a deterministic annealing framework, the algorithm can automatically reject a fraction of the points as outliers. Experiments on both 2D synthetic point-sets with varying degrees of deformation, noise and outliers, and on real 3D sulcal point-sets (extracted from brain MRI) demonstrate the robustness of the algorithm.