An application independent review of multimodal 3D registration methods

Registration is a ubiquitous operation in Visual Computing, with applications in 3D object retrieval among others. Registration is the process of overlaying two or more datasets taken from different viewpoints, at different times or by different sensors into a common reference frame. Multimodal registration is a special case where the data to be matched do not belong to the same modality and is challenging due to the diverse nature of the modalities involved which makes the creation of a distance function harder. Due to the large number of possible modality combinations and application fields, a considerable number of multimodal registration techniques have been proposed in diverse fields, including medicine and archaeology. This survey aims to unify 3D multimodal registration techniques (i.e. where at least one of the modalities is in 3D) across application domains, with the hope of providing an application-independent view and the potential for cross-fertilization. The problem of 3D multimodal registration is explicitly defined and the various methods are systematically categorized and described in terms of a number of important properties. Methods with publicly available source code have been compared on common datasets. A discussion on trends, observations and challenges for further research concludes the review