Approximation Methods for Thin Plate Spline （薄板样条逼近方法）.pdf

1 Approximation Methods for Thin Plate Spline Mappings and Principal Warps Gianluca Donato and Serge Belongie G. Donato: Digital Persona, Inc., Redwood City, CA 94063 (email: gianlucad@). S. Belongie: U.C. San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093 (email: sjb@) October 14, 2002 DRAFT 2 Abstract The thin plate spline (TPS) is an effective tool for modeling coordinate transformations that has been applied successfully in several computer vision applications. Unfortunately the solution requires the inversion of a matrix, where is the number of points in the data set, thus making it impractical for large scale applications. In practical applications, however, a surprisingly good approximate solution is often possible using only a small subset of corresponding points. We begin by discussing the obvious approach of using this subset to estimate a transformation that is then applied to all the points, and we show the drawbacks of this method. We then proceed to borrow a technique from the machine learning community for function approximation using radial basis functions (RBFs) and adapt it to the task at hand. Using this method, we demonstrate a significant improvement over the naive method. One drawback of this method, however, is that is does not allow for principal warp analysis, a technique for studying shape deformations introduced by Bookstein based on the eigenvectors of the bending energy matrix. To address this, we describ