Volumetric heat kernel signatures

Invariant shape descriptors are instrumental in numerous shape analysis tasks including deformable shape comparison, registration, classification, and retrieval. Most existing constructions model a 3D shape as a two-dimensional surface describing the shape boundary, typically represented as a triangular mesh or a point cloud. Using intrinsic properties of the surface, invariant descriptors can be designed. One such example is the recently introduced heat kernel signature, based on the Laplace-Beltrami operator of the surface. In many applications, however, a volumetric shape model is more natural and convenient. Moreover, modeling shape deformations as approximate isometries of the volume of an object, rather than its boundary, better captures natural behavior of non-rigid deformations in many cases. Here, we extend the idea of heat kernel signature to robust isometry-invariant volumetric descriptors, and show their utility in shape retrieval. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the SHREC 2010 large-scale shape retrieval benchmark.