Estimating rigid‐body motion from three‐dimensional data without matching point correspondences

The estimation of the three‐dimensional (3‐D) motion parameters of a rigid body is a very important subject in scene analysis and trajectory prediction. Motion parameters can be estimated from two sets of object feature points before and after the motion. In general, the matching correspondences of the feature points are available, and the motion parameters can be estimated by solving equations associated with the correspondences. In this paper, we present a new method for motion estimation from 3‐D data without requiring the knowledge of matching correspondences.