Fast rigid rotational alignment of voxelized 3-D density maps in sliced Wasserstein distance

Abstract

We develop a fast method for the rigid alignment of voxelized three-dimensional density functions over $\mathsf{SO}(3)$ using sliced optimal transport. Our approach efficiently transforms each density map into a tensor of one-dimensional quantile functions, taken from central slices over the unit sphere, such that the Euclidean distance of the transformed volumes approximates the sliced 2-Wasserstein distance. Our formulation is therefore compatible with existing, fast, voxel-based Euclidean alignment algorithms. We provide theoretical analysis and numerical experiments demonstrating that the sliced 2-Wasserstein distance is a robust metric for comparing three-dimensional shapes and for computing their rigid alignment.