Energy Based Shape Matching of Surfaces

Shape matching finds application in many areas like character recognition, object search, object tracking, computer games, mechanical part inspection etc. This paper presents a new approach to shape matching of free-form surfaces using an analogy from structural mechanics. In this methodology, one of the two surfaces being matched is treated as an instance of deformed version of the other and the strain energy necessary to deform the surface is used as a measure of shape matching. The strain energy is defined in terms intrinsic properties of surfaces using concepts of differential geometry. Results obtained by implementing the proposed approach show that it has a potential to be used for many engineering applications including computer vision.