Spectral geometric features for shapes

This chapter introduces a new method for extracting salient features from surfaces in the Laplace–Beltrami spectral domain instead of usual spatial domains. The local shape descriptor of a feature point is the Laplace–Beltrami spectrum of the spatial region associated to the points which are stable and distinctive. The defined salient spectral geometric features are invariant to spatial transforms such as translation, rotation, and scaling as well as isometric deformations and mesh triangulations. Hence, both global and partial matching can be achieved with these salient features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with many experiments and applications in this chapter.