Deformation-Driven Shape Correspondence

Non-rigid 3D shape correspondence is a fundamental and difficult problem. Most applications which require a correspondence rely on manually selected markers. Without user assistance, the performances of existing automatic correspondence methods depend strongly on a good initial shape alignment or shape prior, and they generally do not tolerate large shape variations. We present an automatic feature correspondence algorithm capable of handling large, non-rigid shape variations, as well as partial matching. This is made possible by leveraging the power of state-of-the-art mesh deformation techniques and relying on a combinatorial tree traversal for correspondence search. The search is deformation-driven, prioritized by a self-distortion energy measured on meshes deformed according to a given correspondence. We demonstrate the ability of our approach to naturally match shapes which differ in pose, local scale, part decomposition, and geometric detail through numerous examples.