A Survey on Shape Correspondence

Abstract We review methods designed to compute correspondences between geometric shapes represented by triangle meshes, contours or point sets. This survey is motivated in part by recent developments in space–time registration, where one seeks a correspondence between non‐rigid and time‐varying surfaces, and semantic shape analysis, which underlines a recent trend to incorporate shape understanding into the analysis pipeline. Establishing a meaningful correspondence between shapes is often difficult because it generally requires an understanding of the structure of the shapes at both the local and global levels, and sometimes the functionality of the shape parts as well. Despite its inherent complexity, shape…