A Unified Definition and Computation of Laplacian Spectral Distances

Laplacian spectral kernels and distances (e.g., biharmonic, heat diffusion, wave kernel distances) are easily defined through a filtering of the Laplacian eigenpairs. They play a central role in several applications, such as dimensionality reduction with spectral embeddings, diffusion geometry, image smoothing, geometric characterisations and embeddings of graphs. Extending the results recently derived in the discrete setting~\citep{PATANE-STAR2016,PATANE-CGF2017} to the continuous case, we propose a novel definition of the Laplacian spectral kernels and distances, whose approximation requires the solution of a set of inhomogeneous Laplace equations. Their discrete counterparts are equivalent to a set of sparse, symmetric, and well-conditioned linear systems, which are efficiently solved with iterative methods. Finally, we discuss the optimality of the Laplacian spectrum for the approximation of the spectral kernels, the relation between the spectral and Green kernels, and the stability of the spectral distances with respect to the evaluation of the Laplacian spectrum and to multiple Laplacian eigenvalues

Laplacian Spectral Basis Functions

Representing a signal as a linear combination of a set of basis functions is central in a wide range of applications, such as approximation, de-noising, compression, shape correspondence and comparison. In this context, our paper addresses the main aspects of signal approximation, such as the definition, computation, and comparison of basis functions on arbitrary 3D shapes. Focusing on the class of basis functions induced by the Laplace-Beltrami operator and its spectrum, we introduce the diffusion and Laplacian spectral basis functions, which are then compared with the harmonic and Laplacian eigenfunctions. As main properties of these basis functions, which are commonly used for numerical geometry processing and shape analysis, we discuss the partition of the unity and non-negativity; the intrinsic definition and invariance with respect to shape transformations (e.g., translation, rotation, uniform scaling); the locality, smoothness, and orthogonality; the numerical stability with respect to the domain discretisation; the computational cost and storage overhead. Finally, we consider geometric metrics, such as the area, conformal, and kernel-based norms, for the comparison and characterisation of the main properties of the Laplacian basis functions

Wavelet-based Heat Kernel Derivatives: Towards Informative Localized Shape Analysis

In this paper, we propose a new construction for the Mexican hat wavelets on shapes with applications to partial shape matching. Our approach takes its main inspiration from the well-established methodology of diffusion wavelets. This novel construction allows us to rapidly compute a multiscale family of Mexican hat wavelet functions, by approximating the derivative of the heat kernel. We demonstrate that it leads to a family of functions that inherit many attractive properties of the heat kernel (e.g., a local support, ability to recover isometries from a single point, efficient computation). Due to its natural ability to encode high-frequency details on a shape, the proposed method reconstructs and transfers $\delta$-functions more accurately than the Laplace-Beltrami eigenfunction basis and other related bases. Finally, we apply our method to the challenging problems of partial and large-scale shape matching. An extensive comparison to the state-of-the-art shows that it is comparable in performance, while both simpler and much faster than competing approaches.Comment: 14 lage