Shape Matching by Time Integration of Partial Differential Equations

Abstract

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.

In this paper we explore an alternative solution strategy. We discretise the underlying partial differential equations (PDEs) not only in space as in the mentioned approaches, but we also tackle temporal parts by using time integration methods. Thus we do not perform eigenfunction expansions and avoid the use of additional strategies and corresponding parameters. We study here the PDEs behind the heat and wave kernel signature, respectively. Our shape matching experiments show that our approach may lead to quality improvements for finding correct correspondences in comparison to the eigenfunction expansion methods.