Biharmonic deformation transfer with automatic key point selection

Deformation transfer is an important research problem in geometry processing and computer animation.A fundamental problem for existing deformation transfer methods is to build reliable correspondences. This is challenging, especially when the source and target shapes differ significantly and manual labeling is typically used. We propose a novel deformation transfer method that aims at minimizing user effort. We adapt a biharmonic weight deformation framework which is able to produce plausible deformation even with only a few key points. We then develop an automatic algorithm to identify a minimum set of key points on the source model that characterizes the deformation well. While minimal user effort is still needed to specify corresponding points on the target model for the selected key points, our approach avoids the difficult problem of choosing key points. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, despite requiring little user effort, produces better deformation results than alternative solutions. Keywords: shape deformation; biharmonic weights; key point selection; deformation transfe