Deformation-Guided Unsupervised Non-Rigid Shape Matching
This addresses shape matching for computer vision and graphics applications, particularly for noisy 3D scanner data, but is incremental as it builds on hierarchical and deformation-based strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of non-rigid shape matching for 3D scans with noise and fine detail, achieving significantly better results on raw scans than state-of-the-art methods while performing competitively on standard tests.
We present an unsupervised data-driven approach for non-rigid shape matching. Shape matching identifies correspondences between two shapes and is a fundamental step in many computer vision and graphics applications. Our approach is designed to be particularly robust when matching shapes digitized using 3D scanners that contain fine geometric detail and suffer from different types of noise including topological noise caused by the coalescence of spatially close surface regions. We build on two strategies. First, using a hierarchical patch based shape representation we match shapes consistently in a coarse to fine manner, allowing for robustness to noise. This multi-scale representation drastically reduces the dimensionality of the problem when matching at the coarsest scale, rendering unsupervised learning feasible. Second, we constrain this hierarchical matching to be reflected in 3D by fitting a patch-wise near-rigid deformation model. Using this constraint, we leverage spatial continuity at different scales to capture global shape properties, resulting in matchings that generalize well to data with different deformations and noise characteristics. Experiments demonstrate that our approach obtains significantly better results on raw 3D scans than state-of-the-art methods, while performing on-par on standard test scenarios.