Biharmonic density estimate — A scale space signature for deformable surfaces

A novel intrinsic geometric scale space formulation for 3D deformable surfaces termed as the Biharmonic Density Estimate (BDE) is proposed. The proposed BDE signature allows for multiscale surface feature-based representation of deformable 3D shapes for subsequent image and scene analysis. It is shown to provide an underlying theoretical framework for the concept of intrinsic geometric scale space, resulting in a highly descriptive characterization of both, the local surface structure and the global metric of the 3D shape. The compactness and robustness of the proposed BDE signature are demonstrated via a series of experiments and a key components detection application.