DWKS: A Local Descriptor of Deformations Between Meshes and Point Clouds

Abstract

We propose a novel pointwise descriptor, called DWKS, aimed at finding correspondences across two deformable shape collections. Unlike the majority of existing descriptors, rather than capturing local geometry, DWKS captures the deformation around a point within a collection in a multi-scale and informative manner. This, in turn, allows to compute inter-collection correspondences without using landmarks. To this end, we build upon the successful spectral WKS descriptors, but rather than using the Laplace-Beltrami operator, show that a similar construction can be performed on shape difference operators, that capture differences or distortion within a collection. By leveraging the collection information our descriptor facilitates difficult non-rigid shape matching tasks, even in the presence of strong partiality and significant deformations. We demonstrate the utility of our approach across a range of challenging matching problems on both meshes and point clouds. The code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/RobinMagnet/DWKS.