We have presented a novel method for the correspondence of two faceted (triangulated) surfaces. The method is based on the production of a sparse polyhedral representation of one shape and matching this to a sparse pointset representation of the other. No curvature estimation of either surface is required. The only control parameter of the algorithm, the target number of vertices during decimation, is not critical and could probably be automated. Qualitative results have been presented which show that the algorithm can produce accurate non-rigid correspondences between pairs of smooth synthetic shapes. This has also been shown for complex biological shapes in the production of a binary tree of merged shapes. Such a tree provides a framework for the automated landmarking of the input example shapes necessary for the production of a 3D PDM. The automatic production of such a model and the testing of its accuracy is the focus of our current research.
Alan Brett