Spherical Matching for Temporal Correspondence of Non-Rigid Surfaces

This paper introduces spherical matching to estimate dense temporal correspondence of non-rigid surfaces with genus-zero topology. The spherical domain gives a consistent 2D parameterisation of non-rigid surfaces for matching. Non-rigid 3D surface correspondence is formulated as the recovery of a bijective mapping between two surfaces in the 2D domain. Formulating matching as a 2D bijection guarantees a continuous one-to-one surface correspondence without overfolding. This overcomes limitations of direct estimation of non-rigid surface correspondence in the 3D domain. A multiple resolution coarse-to-fine algorithm is introduced to robustly estimate the dense correspondence which minimises the disparity in shape and appearance between two surfaces