A tutorial on finding minimum point correspondences between two point sets

This is a general tutorial for 3D point cloud registration using SVD based closed form approaches with known correspondences.

• The main blog post providing theoretical/geometric justification can be found here: A tutorial on finding minimum point correspondences between two point sets.
• Code supplements the blog post by providing ipython notebook to play around with: 3D_point-set-registration

We also investigate what the minimum number of corresponding points needed is to register two point sets. This problem seems deceptively simple but I couldn’t find a clear answer in standard computer vision/robotics texts. Therefore, this post offers a concise answer from multiple perspectives: theoretical, algorithmic and from geometric intuition by going through the original papers from the 1960s.