Abstract
This paper introduces a novel 4D shape descriptor to match temporal surface sequences. A quantitative evaluation based on the receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) curve is presented to compare the performance of conventional 3D shape descriptors with and without using a time filter. Feature- based 3D shape descriptors including shape distribution (Osada et al., 2002 ), spin image (Johnson et al., 1999), shape histogram (Ankest et al., 1999) and spherical harmonics (Kazhdan et al., 2003) are considered. Evaluation shows that filtered descriptors outperform unfiltered descriptors and the best performing volume-sampling shape-histogram descriptor is extended to define a new 4D "shape-flow" descriptor. Shape-flow matching demonstrates improved performance in the context of matching time-varying sequences which is motivated by the requirement to connect similar sequences for animation production. Both simulated and real 3D human surface motion sequences are used for evaluation.