Fig. 3

MS3ALIGN comprises of five stages. P and Q are input surfaces represented as triangle meshes. i Mean curvature is computed for both surfaces. ii Significant landmarks are extracted by first computing the Morse-Smale complex of the curvature field and then simplifying the Morse-Smale complex using topological persistence. The maxima that survive simplification (red spheres) are used as landmark points. iii Correspondences between landmark points on either surface is established by comparing the multi-scale curvature vectors. iv A graph is constructed where each landmark correspondence is considered as a node, and edges are placed between nodes if they satisfy inequalities (1) and (2). Each maximal clique in this graph generates a maximal correspondence set. v Each maximal correspondence set is evaluated using the measure given by (3). Those evaluating to the smallest values are ranked as the best alignments