One of the challenges in 3D shape matching arises from the fact that in many applications, models should be considered to be the same if they differ by a rotation. Consequently, when comparing two models, a similarity metric implicitly provides the measure of similarity at the optimal alignment. Explicitly solving for the optimal alignment is usually impractical. So, two general methods have been proposed for addressing this issue: (1) Every model is represented using rotation invariant descriptors. (2) Every model is described by a rotation dependent descriptor that is aligned into a canonical coordinate system defined by the model. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of canonical alignment and present a new mathematical tool, based on spherical harmonics, for obtaining rotation invariant representations. We describe the properties of this tool and show how it can be applied to a number of existing, orientation dependent, descriptors to improve their matching performance. The advantage of this is twofold: First, it improves the matching performance of many descriptors. Second, it reduces the dimensionality of the descriptor, providing a more compact representation, which in turn makes comparing two models more efficient.

Large motion data sets often contain many variants of the same kind of motion, but without appropriate tools it is difficult to fully exploit this fact. This paper provides automated methods for identifying logically similar motions in a data set and using them to build a continuous and intuitively parameterized space of motions. To find logically similar motions that are numerically dissimilar, our search method employs a novel distance metric to find “close ” motions and then uses them as intermediaries to find more distant motions. Search queries are answered at interactive speeds through a precomputation that compactly represents all possibly similar motion segments. Once a set of related motions has been extracted, we automatically register them and apply blending techniques to create a continuous space of motions. Given a function that defines relevant motion parameters, we present a method for extracting motions from this space that accurately possess new parameters requested by the user. Our algorithm extends previous work by explicitly constraining blend weights to reasonable values and having a run-time cost that is nearly independent of the number of example motions. We present experimental results on a test data set of 37,000 frames, or about ten minutes of motion sampled at 60 Hz.

A large number of 3D models are created and available on the Web, since more and more 3D modelling and digitizing tools are developed for ever increasing applications. The techniques for content-based 3D model retrieval then become necessary. In this paper, a visual similarity-based 3D model retrieval system is proposed.

Recognition of three dimensional (3D) objects in noisy and cluttered scenes is a challenging problem in 3D computer vision. One approach that has been successful in past research is the regional shape descriptor. In this paper, we introduce two new regional shape descriptors: 3D shape contexts and harmonic shape contexts. We evaluate the performance of these descriptors on the task of recognizing vehicles in range scans of scenes using a database of 56 cars. We compare the two novel descriptors to an existing descriptor, the spin image, showing that the shape context based descriptors have a higher recognition rate on noisy scenes and that 3D shape contexts outperform the others on cluttered scenes.

We address the problem of segmenting 3D scan data into objects or object classes. Our segmentation framework is based on a subclass of Markov Random Fields (MRFs) which support efficient graph-cut inference. The MRF models incorporate a large set of diverse features and enforce the preference that adjacent scan points have the same classification label. We use a recently proposed maximummargin framework to discriminatively train the model from a set of labeled scans; as a result we automatically learn the relative importance of the features for the segmentation task. Performing graph-cut inference in the trained MRF can then be used to segment new scenes very efficiently. We test our approach on three large-scale datasets produced by different kinds of 3D sensors, showing its applicability to both outdoor and indoor environments containing diverse objects. 1.

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The development of effective content-based multimedia search systems is an important research issue due to the growing amount of digital audio-visual information. In the case of images and video, the growth of digital data has been observed since the introduction of 2D capture devices. A similar development is expected for 3D data as

future trends

Content based 3D shape retrieval for broad domains like the World Wide Web has recently gained considerable attention in Computer Graphics community. One of the main challenges in this context is the mapping of 3D objects into compact canonical representations referred to as descriptors, which serve as search keys during the retrieval process. The descriptors should have certain desirable properties like invariance under scaling, rotation and translation. Very importantly, they should possess descriptive power providing a basis for similarity measure between three-dimensional objects which is close to the human notion of resemblance. In this paper we advocate the usage of so-called 3D Zernike invariants as descriptors for content based 3D shape retrieval. The basis polynomials of this representation facilitate computation of invariants under the above transformations. Some theoretical results have already been summarized in the past from the aspect of pattern recognition and shape analysis. We provide practical analysis of these invariants along with algorithms and computational details. Furthermore, we give a detailed discussion on influence of the algorithm parameters like type and resolution of the conversion into a volumetric function, number of utilized coefficients, etc. As is revealed by our study, the 3D Zernike descriptors are natural extensions of spherical harmonics based descriptors, which are reported to be among the most successful representations at present. We conduct a comparison of 3D Zernike descriptors against these regarding computational aspects and shape retrieval performance.

This project represents the results of our ongoing work to efficiently use local shape features and is more thoroughly described in the article “Partial Matching of 3D Shapes with Priority-Driven Search” [Funkhouser and Shilane 2006] with the following abstract. “Priority-driven search is an algorithm for retrieving similar shapes from a large database of 3D objects. Given a query object and a database of target objects, all represented by sets of local 3D shape features, the algorithm produces a ranked list of the c best target objects sorted by how well any subset of k features on the query match features on the target object. To achieve this goal, the system maintains a priority queue of potential sets of feature correspondences (partial matches) sorted by a cost function accounting for both feature dissimilarity and the geometric deformation. Only partial matches that can possibly lead to the best full match are popped off the queue, and thus the system is able to find a provably optimal match while investigating only a small subset of potential matches. New methods based on feature distinction, feature correspondences at multiple scales, and feature difference ranking further improve search time and retrieval performance. In experiments with the Princeton Shape Benchmark, the algorithm provides significantly better classification rates than previously tested shape matching methods while returning the best matches in a few seconds per query.“ Please see the paper for further details. 2