The acquisition of geometric information from real-world objects has become a major way of modeling complex scenes and environments. Unfortunately, most optical methods for geometric model acquisition require the combination of partial information from different view points in order to obtain a single, coherent model. This, in turn, requires the registration of partial models into a common coordinate frame, a process that is usually done offline. As a consequence, holes due to undersampling and missing information often cannot be detected until after the registration.

In this paper we introduce a fast, hardware-accelerated method for registering a new view to an existing partial geometric model in a volumetric representation. This method currently performs roughly one registration every second, and is therefore fast enough for on-the-fly evaluation by the user. Given more time, the same method is also capable of producing full geometric models at very high quality.