Shape Matching By Time Integration Of Partial Differential Equations

The main task in three dimensional shape matching is to retrieve correspondences between two similar three dimensional objects. To this end, a suitable point descriptor which is invariant under isometric transformations is required. A commonly used descriptor class relies on the spectral decomposition of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. Important examples are the heat kernel signature and the more recent wave kernel signature. In previous works, the evaluation of the descriptor is based on eigenfunction expansions. Thereby a significant practical aspect is that computing a complete expansion is very time and memory consuming. Thus additional strategies are usually introduced that enable to employ only part of the full expansion.