Robust Nonrigid Registration by Convex Optimization

We present an approach to nonrigid registration of 3D surfaces. We cast isometric embedding as MRF opti-mization and apply efficient global optimization algorithms based on linear programming relaxations. The Markov ran-dom field perspective suggests a natural connection with robust statistics and motivates robust forms of the intrinsic distortion functional. Our approach outperforms a large body of prior work by a significant margin, increasing reg-istration precision on real data by a factor of 3. 1