Robust and Accurate Point Set Registration with Generalized Bayesian Coherent Point Drift

Point set registration (PSR) is an essential problem in surgical navigation and image-guided surgery (IGS). It can help align the pre-operative volumetric images with the intra-operative surgical space. The performances of PSR are susceptible to noise and outliers, which are the cases in real-world surgical scenarios. In this paper, we provide a novel point set registration method that utilizes the features extracted from the PSs and can guarantee the convergence of the algorithm simultaneously. More specifically, we formulate the PSR with normal vectors by generalizing the bayesian coherent point drift (BCPD) into the six-dimension scenario. Our contributions can be summarized as follows. (1) The PSR problem with normal vectors is formulated by generalizing the Bayesian coherent point drift (BCPD) approach; (2) The updated parameters during the algorithm's iterations are given in closed-forms; (3) Extensive experiments have been done to verify the proposed approach and its significant improvements over the BCPD has been validated. We have validated our proposed registration approach on both the human femur model. Results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art registration methods and the convergence is guaranteed at the same time.