Computer Graphics Project Report
Usama Mehmood - 110614650
Stony Brook University
Abstract
The problem of shape matching and surface
registration has gained a lot of attention lately.
Various algorithms have been proposed for
this purpose. Most techniques sub-sample the
points on the shape for efficiency. Sampling
technique that captures maximal information
content has an edge. Geodesic distances be-
tween sampled points are used to create shape
descriptors. Rigid body Registration problem
is solved to a great degree of accuracy. It is
matching under deformations that is currently
being tackled enthusiastically. The paper I im-
plemented in this project gives a fast algorithm
for matching under isometric deformations.
1 Introduction
Due to a surge in modelling and acquisition
techniques, 3d models are becoming common
in many fields such as entertainment, computer
aided design, architecture and medicine.
Hence, the problem of shape matching and
surface registration has gained a lot of attention
lately.
Given two 3d models that are related by a
transformation the goal of shape matching is
to get a dense correspondence between points
on both the shapes. Surface registration on
the other hand tries to find the transformation
between the models ,in addiction to point
correspondences. [3], [2], [7] and [4] assume
a rigid transform between the models, whereas
[9], [8], [5] and [1] also cater to non-rigid
deformations such as isometries.
A deformation is isometric if it transforms the
surface without changing its intrinsic proper-
ties. One such property is geodesic distances.
So an isometry does not stretch or tear the
surface. Many deformations in application
can be approximated well by isometries. For
example moving-parts of machines, human
poses and facial expressions.
For most applications the 3d models are de-
tailed and hence they have a huge vertex count.
Most of the low level detail can be ignored
for the matching problem. Hence for the sake
of efficiency, the first step of matching is to
sub-sample the surface. [9] uses Poisson disk
sampling, [5] uses uniform sampling and [8]
uses farthest point sampling algorithms. The
sampling scheme ensures that the distribution
of points captures the shape of the object
without a significant loss of information. For
rigid transforms it makes more sense to choose
a small subset of points because rigid transform
can be specified using very few parameters.
[9], [8], [5] and [1] make use of geodesic
distances for the matching. Geodesic dis-
tance is invariant to isometric deformation.
Euclidean distance although works well for
rigid body transforms, is not conserved when
the bodies undergo a non-rigid transform. All
these methods incorporate geodesic distances
in the computation of feature descriptor. Each
method has its own pros and cons as discussed
in the following sections. But first we will
look at the Rigid body registration problem.
Isometrically deformed shapes. The geodesic
distances as well as geodesic paths do not
change under such a deformation
2 Project Overview [4]
This is a sampling based shape matching
algorithm that has a planning step to find
”landmark” points. These points contain high-
est information content about the shapes. This
planning set is matched first, and then dense
correspondences are computed. Algorithm
works on meshes as it utilizes the connectivity
information. This technique does not depend
upon key points. They argue that key-point
based techniques are a severe limitation as
they fail on models with insufficient surface
features. Hence this algorithm has an edge over
the techniques discussed above. I have carried
out my experimentation on the famous stanford
bunny. I try to match points points after the
model undergoes rigid body transform. Input
models are represented in the following figures.
2
(a) Model number one, (b) Model number two
3 Poisson disk sampling
First step in the matching pipeline is to
sub-sample both the input models to reduce
the number of points. Multiple techniques
like farthest point sampling and poisson disk
sampling could be used. I implemented a
Poisson disk sampler. It enforces that no two
points on the resampled shapes are closer than
a predefined ε. The value of ε dictates the
number of points that are ultimately sampled.
I use a value of five percent of the diameter
of input model as my value for ε. Using this
value I get 216 points on Model 1 and 194 on
model 2. It is important to note that both the
models had 2503 points originally.
The poisson disk sampler randomly chooses
a point and removes all other points that are
at the most ε distance away from the model.
All the distances are geodesic. They are
computed on the mesh using an open source
implementation of djikstra’s algorithm [6].
It continues iteratively until all the points are
either included or removed. Sampled points
are shown in the following figures.

Samples on Model number one
Samples on Model number two
For the purpose of experimentation I tested
with ε equal to 2.5 percent of the diameter
of the model. It samples only 61 points on
the surface. Rusults are presented below for
comparison.
Samples on Model with ε = 0.025d
As it can be seen ,with this value of ε ,the
sampled points cover inadequate information
3
about the shape. They are sparsely distributed.
4 Iso-curve calculation
Isocurves defined around a point on the mesh
are used to define local descriptors used in this
project. An isocurve around point x is a set of
points that are a fixed distance away from x.
I compute an isocurve by finding the geodesic
distance from the source x to all target points.
Then I include only the points that fall fixed
distance away from the source. These are the
points that lie on the isocurve. The only param-
eter used to define an isocurve around a partic-
ular point is the distance ρ.
Given a Set C which contains points that are on
an isocurve at ρ from x, I compute the length of
isocurve by iteratively finding the distance be-
tween all adjacent points in C. For a point m,
adjacent point is n ε C that is closest to m.
Isocurves on the surface.
5 Descriptors
A descriptor for a particular point is a set of
normalized lengths of isocurves that lie on the
mesh. Length is measured within surface of the
mesh. This is referred as geodesic distances.
An isocurve for a given point is as a set of
points that are fixed distance apart from the
given point. For descriptors they I chose 16
isocurves in the range [0 ρmax ]. ρmax is the
only parameter that can be adjusted in this
scheme. A smaller value focuses on local
information whereas larger value includes
global properties. ρmax is set to thirteen percent
of the diameter of model.
Descriptors are calculated for all 216 points for
model 1 and 193 points for model 2. They are
stored in a file for further use. The computation
of descriptors is a computationally expensive
task. It took four hours to compute descriptors
for four hundred points.
Comparison of descriptors on the tip of bunny’s
ear. (a) Vertex number 1926, (b) Vertex Num-
ber 950, diff is the difference between both
descriptors.
In the above figure both the descriptors are
for points are the tip of the bunny’s ear. Hence
the error between them is really low. Following
figure displays contrasting descriptors.
Comparison of descriptors on the tip of bunny’s
ear and tip of feet. (a) Vertex number 1221,
(b) Vertex Number 1926, diff is the difference
between both descriptors.
The position on the bunny for the vertices
whose descriptors are shown in the above fig-
ure are as follow:
4
Position of Vertex number 1221 and 1926.
6 Matching Algorithm
The following probbabilty values are needed
for the matching algorithm. (1) is the prob-
abilty of how good the descriptors Dx and
Dy match. It has a parameter σd which is
set to 0.55 and σg used in (2) which is set
to 0.045. These values dictate the sensitivity
of the probability values to the difference in
descriptor values. If these parameter values are
increased then the probabilities get closer to
zero. There is a room for experimentation to
find the optimum values.
Pdist on the other hand uses the previously
matched point correspondences to find the
probabilty of how good current points match.
Psamp is a product of Pdist and Pdesc . It
combines both probabilities in a product. Psamp
is used finally to see how good a point y in
shape 2 matches to a point x in shape 1.
Pdist requires the computation of geodesic
distances. If computed on runtime the algo-
rithm takes too long too compute. This is be-
cause geodesic distances on the mesh are com-
puted using the Dijkstra’s algorithm. Dijkstra’s
algorithm is computationally very expensive as
it is iterative in nature. As a solution I precom-
pute a distance matrix K. The entry Mi, j is the • Plan points are chosen to maximize the in-
geodesic distance between the points i and j on formation gain.
the mesh. Using this strategy the computation
time for Pdist is greatly reduced. Computation • Entropy value is used to measure the in-
of Pdist can be formation content.

Pdescr ∼ exp(−0.5σd−2 | Dx − Dy |)(1)

7 Results:

The entropy based algorithm has shown

Pdist (x, y| x1 , y1 , ..., xk , yk )∼
∏ki=1 exp(−0.5σ −2 g (dMs (x, xi )
2
dMt (y, yi )) )(2)
Psamp (x, y | x1 , y1 , ..., xk , yk ) =
Pdesc (x, y).Pdist (x, y | x1 , y1 , ..., xk , yk )(3)
Random Matching algorithm is as follows:
• For first point: Randomly choose x, then
choose y with the maximum Pdescr .
• Given we already have k correspondences
(x1, y1),.., (xk, yk), (xi, yi) MSMT, the
likelihood for one more correspondence
(x, y) MSMT being correct is given by
a Gaussian error model Pdist .
promising results. Planned sampling strategy
adds to the efficiency in solving the problem of
− shape matching. The maximum accuracy that
I reached on this bunny data-set is 42 percent.
This number can be increased in subsequent ex-
periments by sampling more number of points
on both the models. Bunny model is a tough
one for this experiment. The descriptors used
for this algorithm are very same in highly pla-
nar regions. This has also caused a difficulty
in matching. If point chosen at random lies on
a flat region then its descriptor is similar to a
large number of other points. Hence If the ini-
tial guesses are good then there is more chance
of better final result.

• Pdist is the likelihood that for a new ran-

dom pair [x, y] the intrinsic distances dis-
tances for all the previous matches is con-
served.

• For rest of the points: Randomly choose

x, then choose y with the maximum
Psamp Sampling is continued until no more
matching pairs are found that do not ex-
ceed the maximum error threshold or until
all points are matched.
Result from the paper: First column shows
Planned Matching Algorithm: resampled points using poisson disk sampling.
Other images represent the point correspon-
• Uses Plan points for Random Matching al- dences found using the landmark sampling
gorithm. technique

5
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