  We review the general problem of finding a global rotation that transforms a
given set of points and/or coordinate frames (the "test" data) into the best
possible alignment with a corresponding set (the "reference" data). For 3D
point data, this "orthogonal Procrustes problem" is often phrased in terms of
minimizing a root-mean-square deviation or RMSD corresponding to a Euclidean
distance measure relating the two sets of matched coordinates. We focus on
quaternion eigensystem methods that have been exploited to solve this problem
for at least five decades in several different bodies of scientific literature
where they were discovered independently. While numerical methods for the
eigenvalue solutions dominate much of this literature, it has long been
realized that the quaternion-based RMSD optimization problem can also be solved
using exact algebraic expressions based on the form of the quartic equation
solution published by Cardano in 1545; we focus on these exact solutions to
expose the structure of the entire eigensystem for the traditional 3D spatial
alignment problem. We then explore the structure of the less-studied
orientation data context, investigating how quaternion methods can be extended
to solve the corresponding 3D quaternion orientation frame alignment (QFA)
problem, noting the interesting equivalence of this problem to the
rotation-averaging problem, which also has been the subject of independent
literature threads. We conclude with a brief discussion of the combined 3D
translation-orientation data alignment problem. Appendices are devoted to a
tutorial on quaternion frames, a related quaternion technique for extracting
quaternions from rotation matrices, and a review of quaternion
rotation-averaging methods relevant to the orientation-frame alignment problem.
Supplementary Material covers extensions of quaternion methods to the 4D
problem.
