Laplace-Beltrami nodal counts: A new signature for 3D shape analysis

In this paper we develop a new approach of analyzing 3D shapes based on the eigen-system of the Laplace-Beltrami operator. While the eigenvalues of the Laplace-Beltrami operator have been used previously in shape analysis, they are unable to differentiate isospectral shapes. To overcome this limitation, we propose here a new signature based on nodal counts of the eigenfunctions. This signature provides a compact representation of the geometric information that is missing in the eigenvalues. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed signature can successfully classify anatomical shapes with similar eigenvalues.