Surface matching with salient keypoints in geodesic scale space

This paper develops a new salient keypoints-based shape description which extracts the salient surface keypoints with detected scales. Salient geometric features can then be defined collectively on all the detected scale normalized local patches to form a shape descriptor for surface snatching purpose. The saliency-driven keypoints are computed as local extrema of the difference of Ganssian function defined over a curved surface in geodesic scale space. This method can properly function on either manifold or non-manifold surface without resorting to any surface snapping or parameterization procedures. Therefore, it has a wide utility in many applications such as shape matching, classification, and recognition. Our experiments on 3D shapes demonstrate that the salient keypoints and local feature descriptors are robust and stable to noisy input and insensitive to resolution change. We have applied our technique to the tasks of 3D shape snatching, and the experimental results showed good performance and the effectiveness of this new method. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.