A new affine registration algorithm for matching 2D point sets

We propose a novel affine registration algorithm for matching 2D feature points. Unlike many previously published work on affine point matching, the proposed algorithm does not require any optimization and in the absence of data noise, the algorithm will recover the exact affine transformation and the unknown correspondence. The twostep algorithm first reduces the general affine case to the orthogonal case, and the unknown rotation is computed as the roots of a low-degree polynomial with complex coefficients. The algebraic and geometric ideas behind the proposed method are both clear and transparent, and its implementation is straightforward. We validate the algorithm on a variety of synthetic 2D point sets as well as feature points on images of real-world objects.