Abstract

In this paper a new astrodynamics inspired rigid pointset registration algorithm is introduced — the GravitationalApproach (GA). We formulate point set registration as amodified N -body problem with additional constraints andobtain an algorithm with unique properties which is fullyscalable with the number of processing cores. In GA, a tem-plate point set moves in a viscous medium under gravita-tional forces induced by a reference point set. Pose updates are completed by numerically solving the differential equations of Newtonian mechanics. We discuss techniques for efficient implementation of the new algorithm and evaluate it on several synthetic and real-world scenarios. GA is compared with the widely used Iterative Closest Point and thestate of the art rigid Coherent Point Drift algorithms. Ex-periments evidence that the new approach is robust againstnoise and can handle challenging scenarios with structuredoutliers.