Discriminating Deformable Shape Classes

We present and empirically test a novel approach for categorizing 3-D free form object shapes represented by range data. In contrast to traditional surface-signature based systems that use alignment to match specific objects, we adapted the newly introduced symbolic-signature representation to classify deformable shapes [10]. Our approach constructs an abstract description of shape classes using an ensemble of classifiers that learn object class parts and their corresponding geometrical relationships from a set of numeric and symbolic descriptors. We used our classification engine in a series of large scale discrimination experiments on two well-defined classes that share many common distinctive features. The experimental results suggest that our method outperforms traditional numeric signature-based methodologies.