Non-Rigid Shape Correspondence

Overview

Non-rigid shape correspondence finds which points or regions on different 3D shapes represent the same location despite changes in pose, deformation, or partial visibility. Methods include spectral and functional maps built from surface geometry, learned descriptors with contrastive or coarse-to-fine matching, and deformation or transport-based registration; newer approaches also use semantic cues from vision and language models. These methods are evaluated on human and animal meshes, scans, and deforming sequences, including settings represented by benchmarks such as SMAL, TOPKIDS, and 4DMatch. A central challenge is that geometric methods can struggle with strong non-isometric changes, missing regions, and topology differences, while semantic guidance can help but may not transfer reliably across categories.

Latest papers

37 papers3 papers in the last four weeks, down 25% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

Mar 19, 2026

Unsupervised Contrastive Learning for Efficient and Robust Spectral Shape Matching

Estimating correspondences between pairs of non-rigid deformable 3D shapes remains a significant challenge in computer vision and graphics. While deep functional map methods have become the go-to solution for addressing this problem, they primarily focus on optimizing pointwise and functional maps either individually or jointly, rather than directly enhancing feature representations in the embedding space, which often results in inadequate feature quality and suboptimal matching performance. Furthermore, these approaches heavily rely on traditional functional map techniques, such as time-consuming functional map solvers, which incur substantial computational costs. In this work, we introduce, for the first time, a novel unsupervised contrastive learning-based approach for efficient and robust 3D shape matching. We begin by presenting an unsupervised contrastive learning framework that promotes feature learning by maximizing consistency within positive similarity pairs and minimizing it within negative similarity pairs, thereby improving both the consistency and discriminability of the learned features.We then design a significantly simplified functional map learning architecture that eliminates the need for computationally expensive functional map solvers and multiple auxiliary functional map losses, greatly enhancing computational efficiency. By integrating these two components into a unified two-branch pipeline, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is not only computationally efficient but also outperforms current state-of-the-art methods across various challenging benchmarks, including near-isometric, non-isometric, and topologically inconsistent scenarios, even surpassing supervised techniques.
Mar 16, 2026

Feed-forward Gaussian Registration for Head Avatar Creation and Editing

We present MATCH (Multi-view Avatars from Topologically Corresponding Heads), a multi-view Gaussian registration method for high-quality head avatar creation and editing. State-of-the-art multi-view head avatar methods require time-consuming head tracking followed by expensive avatar optimization, often resulting in a total creation time of more than one day. MATCH, in contrast, directly predicts Gaussian splat textures in correspondence from calibrated multi-view images in just 0.5 seconds per frame, without requiring data preprocessing. The learned intra-subject correspondence across frames enables fast creation of personalized head avatars, while correspondence across subjects supports applications such as expression transfer, optimization-free tracking, semantic editing, and identity interpolation. We establish these correspondences end-to-end using a transformer-based model that predicts Gaussian splat textures in the fixed UV layout of a template mesh. To achieve this, we introduce a novel registration-guided attention block, where each UV-map token attends exclusively to image tokens depicting its corresponding mesh region. This design improves efficiency and performance compared to dense cross-view attention. MATCH outperforms existing methods in novel-view synthesis, geometry registration, and head avatar generation, while making avatar creation 10 times faster than the closest competing baseline. The code and model weights are available on the project website.
Mar 13, 2026

SGMatch: Semantic-Guided Non-Rigid Shape Matching with Flow Regularization

Establishing accurate point-to-point correspondences between non-rigid 3D shapes remains a critical challenge, particularly under non-isometric deformations and topological noise. Existing functional map pipelines suffer from ambiguities that geometric descriptors alone cannot resolve, and spatial inconsistencies inherent in the projection of truncated spectral bases to dense pointwise correspondences. In this paper, we introduce SGMatch, a learning-based framework that couples 3D-lifted semantic cues with trajectory-level feature transport regularization. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Guided Local Cross-Attention module that integrates semantic features from vision foundation models into geometric descriptors while preserving local structural continuity. Furthermore, we adapt conditional flow matching as a time-conditioned feature transport regularizer that promotes spatially coherent point-wise recovery. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SGMatch achieves competitive performance across near-isometric settings and consistent improvements under non-isometric deformations and topological noise.
Mar 8, 2026

GLASS: Graph and Vision-Language Assisted Semantic Shape Correspondence

Establishing dense correspondence across 3D shapes is crucial for fundamental downstream tasks, including texture transfer, shape interpolation, and robotic manipulation. However, learning these mappings without manual supervision remains a formidable challenge, particularly under severe non-isometric deformations and in inter-class settings where geometric cues are ambiguous. Conventional functional map methods, while elegant, typically struggle in these regimes due to their reliance on isometry. To address this, we present GLASS, a framework that bridges the gap by integrating geometric spectral analysis with rich semantic priors from vision-language foundation models. GLASS introduces three key innovations: (i) a view-consistent strategy that enables robust multi-view visual feature extraction from powerful vision foundation models; (ii) the injection of language embeddings into vertex descriptors via zero-shot 3D segmentation, capturing high-level part semantics; and (iii) a graph-assisted contrastive loss that enforces structural consistency between regions (e.g., source's head'' ↔\leftrightarrow target's head'') by leveraging geodesic and topological relationships between regions. This design allows GLASS to learn globally coherent and semantically consistent maps without ground-truth supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GLASS achieves state-of-the-art performance across all regimes, maintaining high accuracy on standard near-isometric tasks while significantly advancing performance in challenging settings. Specifically, it achieves average geodesic errors of 0.21, 4.5, and 5.6 on the inter-class benchmark SNIS and non-isometric benchmarks SMAL and TOPKIDS, reducing errors from URSSM baselines of 0.49, 6.0, and 8.9 by 57%, 25%, and 37%, respectively.
Feb 22, 2026

Universal 3D Shape Matching via Coarse-to-Fine Language Guidance

Establishing dense correspondences between shapes is a crucial task in computer vision and graphics, while prior approaches depend on near-isometric assumptions and homogeneous subject types (i.e., only operate for human shapes). However, building semantic correspondences for cross-category objects remains challenging and has received relatively little attention. To achieve this, we propose UniMatch, a semantic-aware, coarse-to-fine framework for constructing dense semantic correspondences between strongly non-isometric shapes without restricting object categories. The key insight is to lift "coarse" semantic cues into "fine" correspondence, which is achieved through two stages. In the "coarse" stage, we perform class-agnostic 3D segmentation to obtain non-overlapping semantic parts and prompt multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to identify part names. Then, we employ pretrained vision language models (VLMs) to extract text embeddings, enabling the construction of matched semantic parts. In the "fine" stage, we leverage these coarse correspondences to guide the learning of dense correspondences through a dedicated rank-based contrastive scheme. Thanks to class-agnostic segmentation, language guiding, and rank-based contrastive learning, our method is versatile for universal object categories and requires no predefined part proposals, enabling universal matching for inter-class and non-isometric shapes. Extensive experiments demonstrate UniMatch consistently outperforms competing methods in various challenging scenarios.
Nov 17, 2025

FUSE: A Flow-based Mapping Between Shapes

We introduce a novel neural representation for maps between 3D shapes based on flow-matching models, which is computationally efficient and supports cross-representation shape matching without large-scale training or data-driven procedures. 3D shapes are represented as the probability distribution induced by a continuous and invertible flow mapping from a fixed anchor distribution. Given a source and a target shape, the composition of the inverse flow (source to anchor) with the forward flow (anchor to target), we map points between the two surfaces. By encoding the shapes with a pointwise task-tailored embedding, this construction provides an invertible and modality-agnostic representation of maps between shapes across point clouds, meshes, signed distance fields (SDFs), and volumetric data. The resulting representation consistently achieves high coverage and accuracy across diverse benchmarks and challenging settings in shape matching. Beyond shape matching, our framework shows promising results in other tasks, including UV mapping and registration of raw point cloud scans of human bodies.
Jan 15, 2025

Human Pose-Constrained UV Map Estimation

UV map estimation is used in computer vision for detailed analysis of human posture or activity. Previous methods assign pixels to body model vertices by comparing pixel descriptors independently, without enforcing global coherence or plausibility in the UV map. We propose Pose-Constrained Continuous Surface Embeddings (PC-CSE), which integrates estimated 2D human pose into the pixel-to-vertex assignment process. The pose provides global anatomical constraints, ensuring that UV maps remain coherent while preserving local precision. Evaluation on DensePose COCO demonstrates consistent improvement, regardless of the chosen 2D human pose model. Whole-body poses offer better constraints by incorporating additional details about the hands and feet. Conditioning UV maps with human pose reduces invalid mappings and enhances anatomical plausibility. In addition, we highlight inconsistencies in the ground-truth annotations.