Abstract

We present a refined method for rotation estimation of sig- nals on the 2-Sphere. Our approach utilizes a fast correlation in the harmonic domain to estimate rotation angles of arbitrary size and reso- lution. The method is able to achieve great accuracy even for very low spherical harmonic expansions of the input signals without using cor- respondences or any other kind of a priori information. The rotation parameters are computed analytically without additional iterative post- processing or “fine tuning”. The theoretical advances presented in this paper can be applied to a wide range of practical problems such as: shape description and shape retrieval, 3D rigid registration, robot positioning with omni-directional cameras or 3D invariant feature design.