3D objects coding and recognition using surface signatures

This paper presents a new concept for 3D coding of free-form surfaces. The proposed coding technique uses the surface signature representation scheme. This representation scheme captures the 3D curvature information of many free-form surface and encodes it into a 2D image corresponding to a certain point on the surface. This image is unique for this point and is independent of the the object translation or orientation in space. For this reason this image is called "surface point signature" (SPS). Using SPS in 3D coding has many applications, such as in 3D compression, 3D pose estimation and 3D object recognition.