3D Meshes Registration : Application to statistical skull model

In the context of computer assist surgical techniques, a new elastic registration method of 3D meshes is presented. In our applications, one mesh is a high density mesh (30000 vertexes), the second is a low density one (1000 vertexes). Registration is based upon the minimisation of a symmetric distance between both meshes, defined on the vertexes, in a multi resolution approach. Results on synthetic images are first presented. Then, thanks to this registration method, a statistical model of the skull is build from Computer Tomography exams collected for twelve patients.