Generalized L2-Divergence and Its Application to Shape Alignment

This paper proposes a novel and robust approach to the groupwise point-sets registration problem in the presence of large amounts of noise and outliers. Each of the point sets is represented by a mixture of Gaussians and the point-sets registration is treated as a problem of aligning the multiple mixtures. We develop a novel divergence measure which is defined between any arbitrary number of probability distributions based on L2 distance, and we call this new divergence measure "Generalized L2-divergence". We derive a closed-form expression for the Generalized-L2 divergence between multiple Gaussian mixtures, which in turn leads to a computationally efficient registration algorithm. This new algorithm has an intuitive interpretation, is simple to implement and exhibits inherent statistical robustness. Experimental results indicate that our algorithm achieves very good performance in terms of both robustness and accuracy.