Unique Shape Context for 3D Data Description

The use of robust feature descriptors is now key for many 3D tasks such as 3D object recognition and surface alignment. Many descriptors have been proposed in literature which are based on a non-unique local Reference Frame and hence require the computation of multiple descriptions at each feature points. In this paper we show how to deploy a unique local Reference Frame to improve the accuracy and reduce the memory footprint of the well-known 3D Shape Context descriptor. We validate our proposal by means of an experimental analysis carried out on a large dataset of 3D scenes and addressing an object recognition scenario.