Autocorrelation Descriptor for Efficient Co-alignment of 3D Shape Collections

Co-aligning a collection of shapes to a consistent pose is a common problem in shape analysis with applications in shape matching, retrieval and visualization. We observe that resolving among some orientations is easier than others, for example, a common mistake for bicycles is to align front-to-back, while even the simplest algorithm would not erroneously pick orthogonal alignment. The key idea of our work is to analyse rotational autocorrelations of shapes to facilitate shape co-alignment.

In particular, we use such an autocorrelation measure of individual shapes to decide which shape pairs might have well-matching orientations; and, if so, which configurations are likely to produce better alignments. This significantly prunes the number of alignments to be examined, and leads to an efficient, scalable algorithm that performs comparably to state-of-the-art techniques on benchmark data sets, but requires significantly fewer computations, resulting in 2–16× speed improvement in our tests.