Abstract A novel correspondence-less approach is proposed to ?nd a thin plate spline map between a pair of deformable 3D objects represented by triangular surface meshes. The proposed method works without landmark extraction and feature correspondences. The aligning transformation is found simply by solving a system of nonlinear equations. Each equation is generated by integrating a nonlinear function over the object’s domains. We derive recursive formulas for the ef?cient computation of these integrals. Based o a series of comparative tests on a large synthetic dataset, our triangular mesh-based algorithm outperforms state of the art methods both in terms of computing time and accuracy. The applicability of the proposed approach has been demonstrated on the registration of 3D lung CT volumes.