Open-curve shape correspondence without endpoint correspondence.

Shape correspondence is the foundation for accurate statistical shape analysis; this is usually accomplished by identifying a set of sparsely sampled and well-corresponded landmark points across a population of shape instances. However, most available shape correspondence methods can only effectively deal with complete-shape correspondence, where a one-to-one mapping is assumed between any two shape instances. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to correspond 2D open-curve partial-shape instances where one shape instance may only be mapped to part of the other, i.e., the endpoints of these open-curve shape instances are not presumably corresponded. In this algorithm, some initially identified landmarks, including the ones at or near the endpoints of the shape instances, are refined by allowing them to slide freely along the shape contour to minimize the shape-correspondence error. To avoid being trapped into local optima, we develop a simple method to construct a better initialization of the landmarks and introduce some additional constraints to the landmark sliding. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on 32 femur shape instances in comparison to some current methods.