A harmonic wave kernel signature for three-dimensional skull similarity measurements

The 3D skull is a well preserved bone under the effect of fire, humidity, temperature changes, and it is a important biological characteristic in the fields of archaeology, forensic science and anthropology. In particular, measuring the 3D skull similarity is a challenging and meaningful task. 3D skulls are geometric models with multiple holes and complex topologies. It is difficult to correctly calculate the similarity between 3D skulls because the general 3D shape similarity measurement is sensitive to boundaries. In this paper, we provide an effective pipeline for measuring the 3D skull similarity by calculating the cosine distance between the harmonic wave kernel signature (HWKS) values of 3D skulls. Based on the wave kernel signature, the HWKS is a shape descriptor which is involved the Laplace-Beltrami operator that can effectively extract geometrical and topological information from the 3D skulls. And the HWKS simultaneously describes the local and global properties of a skull compared to the wave kernel signature. In addition, our method is more flexible, and can be generalized to other 3D shapes. Several experiments show our method achieves good results and can correctly calculate the similarity between 3D skulls.