L.: Unique signatures of histograms for local surface description

Abstract. This paper deals with local 3D descriptors for surface matching. First, we categorize existing methods into two classes: Signatures and Histograms. Then, by discussion and experiments alike, we point out the key issues of unique-ness and repeatability of the local reference frame. Based on these observations, we formulate a novel comprehensive proposal for surface representation, which encompasses a new unique and repeatable local reference frame as well as a new 3D descriptor. The latter lays at the intersection between Signatures and His-tograms, so as to possibly achieve a better balance between descriptiveness and robustness. Experiments on publicly available datasets as well as on range scans obtained with Spacetime Stereo provide a thorough validation of our proposal. 1 Introduction and Previous Work The ability of computing similarities between 3D surfaces, sometimes referred to as surface matching [1], is a key for computer vision tasks such as 3D object recognition and surface alignment. These tasks find numerous applications in fields such as robotics, automation, biometric systems, reverse engineering, search in 3D object databases [1