DINE: Distance Is Not Enough -- Learning Global Deformation Priors for Robust Soft-Tissue Point Cloud Registration
Non-rigid point cloud registration is central to soft-tissue shape analysis, but large deformations, noise, and outliers make correspondence estimation challenging. Most learning-based methods rely on local objectives such as Chamfer distance, which encourage point-wise proximity but do not constrain the global plausibility of the predicted deformation field. We address this limitation with DINE, a maximum a posteriori framework that augments distance-based registration with a learned statistical prior over displacement vector fields. DINE is applied to two registration backbones, Robust-DefRe