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This paper introduces a method to extract fingerprints of any surface or solid object by taking the eigenvalues of its respective Laplace-Beltrami operator. Using an object's spectrum (i.e. the family of its eigenvalues) as a fingerprint for its shape is motivated by the fact that the related eigenvalues are isometry invariants of the object. Employing the Laplace-Beltrami spectra (not the spectra of the mesh Laplacian) as fingerprints of surfaces and solids is a novel approach in the field of geometric modeling and computer graphics. Those spectra can be calculated for any representation of the geometric object (e.g. NURBS or any parametrized or implicitly represented surface or even for polyhedra). Since the spectrum is an isometry invariant of the respective object this fingerprint is also independent of the spatial position. Additionally the eigenvalues can be normalized so that scaling factors for the geometric object can be obtained easily. Therefore checking if two objects are isometric needs no prior alignment (registration/localization) of the objects, but only a comparison of their spectra. With the help of such fingerprints it is possible to support copyright protection, database retrieval and quality assessment of digital data representing surfaces and solids.
Reuter et al. (Mon,) studied this question.