Intrinsic shape signatures: A shape descriptor for 3D object recognition

This paper presents a new approach for recognition of 3D objects that are represented as 3D point clouds. We introduce a new 3D shape descriptor called Intrinsic Shape Signature (ISS) to characterize a local/semi-local region of a point cloud. An intrinsic shape signature uses a view-independent representation of the 3D shape to match shape patches from different views directly, and a view-dependent transform encoding the viewing geometry to facilitate fast pose estimation. In addition, we present a highly efficient indexing scheme for the high dimensional ISS shape descriptors, allowing for fast and accurate search of large model databases. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm on a very challenging task of recognizing different vehicle types using a database of 72 models in the presence of sensor noise, obscuration and scene clutter.