Joint Alignment and Stitching of Non Overlapping Meshes

We contribute a novel algorithm for aligning and stitching non-overlapping 3D meshes. Mesh aligning and stitching are often combined to construct a complete 3D model of an object. There are standard algorithms that address this task for the case of overlapping meshes, i.e., meshes that share common parts of a given object. The overlap allows the registration and alignment of different meshes. The algorithm here proposed, Joint Alignment and Stitching of Non-Overlapping Meshes (JASNOM), addresses the case when the overlap is not possible due to acquisition or application constraints. JASNOM takes advantage that both meshes can only be connected by their boundary to reframe the alignment problem as a search of the best assignment between boundary vertices. Given an assignment, the boundaries can be aligned with a rigid transformation that aligns the two boundaries by minimizing the distance between corresponding vertices while preventing the meshes from intersecting. However, not all assignments are valid. The boundaries are oriented curves and assignments between the two boundaries must preserve the order of the vertices. JASNOM takes advantage of the reduced number of order preserving assignments to perform exhaustive search for the best assignment. The outcome of the search is not only the assignment between points in the boundaries, but also the rigid transformation that aligns the two meshes. After alignment, meshes can then be stitched by using the assignment between vertices. One of the applications we envision for JASNOM is the modeling of 3D objects retrieved from range cameras that cannot overlap such as the Kinect camera. Another possible use of JASNOM is to fill holes in a mesh using parts of other meshes