An Efficient Approach to Correspondences between Multiple Non-Rigid Parts

Identifying multiple deformable parts on meshes and establishing dense correspondences between them are tasks of fundamental importance to computer graphics, with applications to e.g. geometric edit propagation and texture transfer. Much research has considered establishing correspondences between non-rigid surfaces, but little work can both identify similar multiple deformable parts and handle partial shape correspondences. This paper addresses two related problems, treating them as a whole: (i) identifying similar deformable parts on a mesh, related by a non-rigid transformation to a given query part, and (ii) establishing dense point correspondences automatically between such parts. We show that simple and efficient techniques can be developed if we make the assumption that these parts locally undergo isometric deformation. Our insight is that similar deformable parts are suggested by large clusters of point correspondences that are isometrically consistent. Once such parts are identified, dense point correspondences can be obtained by an iterative propagation process. Our techniques are applicable to models with arbitrary topology. Various examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques.