Persistent Heat Signature for Pose-oblivious Matching of Incomplete Models

Although understanding of shape features in the context of shape matching and retrieval has made considerable progress in recent years, the case for partial and incomplete models in presence of pose variations still begs a robust and efficient solution. A signature that encodes features at multi-scales in a pose invariant manner is more appropriate for this case. The Heat Kernel Signature function from spectral theory exhibits this multi-scale property. We show how this concept can be merged with the persistent homology to design a novel efficient pose-oblivious matching algorithm for all models, be they partial, incomplete, or complete. We make the algorithm scalable so that it can handle large data sets. Several test results show the robustness of our approach.