Outlier Robust ICP for Minimizing Fractional RMSD

Abstract: We describe a variation of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm for aligning two point sets under a set of transformations. Our algorithm is superior to previous algorithms because (1) in determining the optimal alignment, it identifies and discards likely outliers in a statistically robust manner, and (2) it is guaranteed to converge to a locally optimal solution. To this end, we formalize a new distance measure, fractional root mean squared distance (frmsd), which incorporates the fraction of inliers into the distance function. We lay out a specific implementation, but our framework can easily incorporate most techniques and heuristics from modern registration algorithms. We experimentally validate our algorithm against previous techniques on 2 and 3 dimensional data exposed to a variety of outlier types.