[Insight-users] point cloud registration

[wenzeld at att.net]

I am a little familiar with ITK.  I am curious about if, and how, the following can be done using ITK.  (I can read the documentation to understand the details; I just need to know if it is possible and generally which class(es) to use.)

1. I have a triangle mesh surface (not closed) and a 3D point cloud of points.  The cloud of points is acquired by a human using an arbitrary traversal across the surface using a Microscribe digitizer.  How can the 3D point cloud be registered to the triangle mesh surface?  I only need to register using rotations, translations, and scale.

2. In another scenario, I have two 3D point clouds (and no triangle mesh surface) which I need to register to each other.  These point clouds are acquired at separate points in time (e.g., days apart) and perhaps even by seperate humans using the digitizer which means their scanning patterns may be different.  So, there is no correspondence between points, at least in the order in which they were digitized.  Is the ICP (iterative closest point) algorithm appropriate for this pointset-to-pointset registration?  If not, does one of the point sets have to be converted into a triangle mesh (if so, how is that done)?

3. If the ICP algorithm is to be used in response to issue number 2 above, then how is the fact that the ICP example in the "examples/patented" folder need to be addressed?  I did not see that any of the classes in the "code/patented" folder were being used by this example.  So, what issues, if any, are there in using this algorithm?

Thanks...

Dennis Wenzel