Temporal 3d Shape Matching

This paper introduces a novel 4D shape descriptor to match temporal surface sequences. A quantitative evaluation based on the Receiver-Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve is presented to compare the performance of conventional 3D shape descriptors with and without using a time filter. Featurebased 3D Shape Descriptors including Shape Distribution [24], Spin Image [14], Shape Histogram [1] and Spherical Harmonics [16] are considered. Evaluation shows that filtered descriptors outperform unfiltered descriptors and the best performing volume-sampling shape-histogram descriptor is extended to define a new 4D “shape-flow” descriptor. Shape-flow matching demonstrates improved performance in the context of matching time-varying sequences which is motivated by the requirement to connect similar sequences for animation production. Both simulated and real 3D human surface motion sequences are used for evaluation.