Rotational contour signatures for robust local surface description

This paper presents a novel local surface descriptor called rotational contour signatures (RCS) for 3D rigid objects. RCS comprises several signatures that characterize the 2D contour information derived from 3D-to-2D projection of the local surface. The inspiration of our encoding technique comes from that, viewing towards an object, its contour is an effective and robust cue for representing its shape. In order to achieve a comprehensive geometry encoding, the local surface is continually rotated in a predefined local reference frame (LRF) so that multi-view information is obtained. Experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed descriptor. Further, comparisons with five state-of-the-art descriptors show the superiority of our RCS descriptor.