Hierarchical aggregation for efficient shape extraction

This paper presents an efficient framework which supports both automatic and interactive shape extraction from surfaces. Unlike most of the existing hierarchical shape extraction methods, which are based on computationally expensive top-down algorithms, our framework employs a fast bottom-up hierarchical method with multiscale aggregation. We introduce a geometric similarity measure, which operates at multiple scales and guarantees that a hierarchy of high-level features are automatically found through local adaptive aggregation. We also show that the aggregation process allows easy incorporation of user-specified constraints, enabling users to interactively extract features of interest. Both our automatic and the interactive shape extraction methods do not require explicit connectivity information, and thus are applicable to unorganized point sets. Additionally, with the hierarchical feature representation, we design a simple and effective method to perform partial shape matching, allowing efficient search of self-similar features across the entire surface. Experiments show that our methods robustly extract visually meaningful features and are significantly faster than related methods.