Surface Registration with Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors

This paper presents a novel surface registration technique using the spectrum of the shapes, which can facilitate accurate localization and visualization of non-isometric deformations of the surfaces. In order to register two surfaces, we map both eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the Laplace-Beltrami of the shapes through optimizing an energy function. The function is defined by the integration of a smoothness term to align the eigenvalues and a distance term between the eigenvectors at feature points to align the eigenvectors. The feature points are generated using the static points of certain eigenvectors of the surfaces. By using both the eigenvalues and the eigenvectors on these feature points, the computational efficiency is improved considerably without losing the accuracy in comparison to the approaches that use the eigenvectors for all vertices. In our technique, the variation of the shape is expressed using a scale function defined at each vertex. Consequently, the total energy function to align the two given surfaces can be defined using the linear interpolation of the scale function derivatives. Through the optimization of the energy function, the scale function can be solved and the alignment is achieved. After the alignment, the eigenvectors can be employed to calculate the point-to-point correspondence of the surfaces. Therefore, the proposed method can accurately define the displacement of the vertices. We evaluate our method by conducting experiments on synthetic and real data using hippocampus, heart, and hand models. We also compare our method with non-rigid Iterative Closest Point (ICP) and a similar spectrum-based methods. These experiments demonstrate the advantages and accuracy of our method.