Procrustes Analysis with Deformations: A Closed-Form Solution by Eigenvalue Decomposition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, globally optimal closed-form solution for generalized Procrustes analysis with deformable transformations, enabling better shape alignment in 2D and 3D datasets.

Contribution

It provides the first eigenvalue decomposition-based closed-form solution for deformable GPA, handling regularization and broad transformation models including TPS.

Findings

The method is fast and globally optimal.

It outperforms previous approaches on diverse datasets.

It effectively handles regularization and deformation models.

Abstract

Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) is the problem of bringing multiple shapes into a common reference by estimating transformations. GPA has been extensively studied for the Euclidean and affine transformations. We introduce GPA with deformable transformations, which forms a much wider and difficult problem. We specifically study a class of transformations called the Linear Basis Warps (LBWs), which contains the affine transformation and most of the usual deformation models, such as the Thin-Plate Spline (TPS). GPA with deformations is a nonconvex underconstrained problem. We resolve the fundamental ambiguities of deformable GPA using two shape constraints requiring the eigenvalues of the shape covariance. These eigenvalues can be computed independently as a prior or posterior. We give a closed-form and optimal solution to deformable GPA based on an eigenvalue decomposition. This solution handles regularization, favoring smooth deformation fields. It requires the transformation model to satisfy a fundamental property of free-translations, which asserts that the model can implement any translation. We show that this property fortunately holds true for most common transformation models, including the affine and TPS models. For the other models, we give another closed-form solution to GPA, which agrees exactly with the first solution for models with free-translation. We give pseudo-code for computing our solution, leading to the proposed DefGPA method, which is fast, globally optimal and widely applicable. We validate our method and compare it to previous work on six diverse 2D and 3D datasets, with special care taken to choose the hyperparameters from cross-validation.