  Gaussian mixture alignment is a family of approaches that are frequently used
for robustly solving the point-set registration problem. However, since they
use local optimisation, they are susceptible to local minima and can only
guarantee local optimality. Consequently, their accuracy is strongly dependent
on the quality of the initialisation. This paper presents the first
globally-optimal solution to the 3D rigid Gaussian mixture alignment problem
under the L2 distance between mixtures. The algorithm, named GOGMA, employs a
branch-and-bound approach to search the space of 3D rigid motions SE(3),
guaranteeing global optimality regardless of the initialisation. The geometry
of SE(3) was used to find novel upper and lower bounds for the objective
function and local optimisation was integrated into the scheme to accelerate
convergence without voiding the optimality guarantee. The evaluation
empirically supported the optimality proof and showed that the method performed
much more robustly on two challenging datasets than an existing
globally-optimal registration solution.
