Registration and integration of multisensor data for photorealistic scene reconstruction

In this paper, we present a method for automatically registering a 3D range image and a 2D color image using the (chi) 2-similarity metric. The goal of this registration is to allow the reconstruction of a scene using multi-sensor information. Traditional registration algorithms use invariant image features to drive the registration process. This approach limits the applicability to multi-modal data since features of interest may not appear in each modality. However, the (chi) 2-similarity metric is an intensity- based approach that has interesting multi-modal characteristics. We explore this metric as a mechanism to govern the registration search. Using range data from a Perceptron laser camera and color data form a Kodak digital camera, we present result using this automatic registration with the (chi) 2-similarity metric.