Shape Matching Based on Diffusion Embedding and on Mutual Isometric Consistency

International audienceWe address the problem of matching two 3D shapes by representing them using the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the discrete diffusion operator. This provides a representation framework useful for both scale-space shape descriptors and shape comparisons. We formally introduce a canonical diffusion embedding based on the combinatorial Laplacian; we reveal some interesting properties and we propose a unit hypersphere normalization of this embedding. We also propose a practical algorithm that seeks the largest set of mutually consistent point-to-point matches between two shapes based on isometric consistency between the two embeddings. We illustrate our method with several examples of matching shapes at various scales