This paper describes in detail a method to extract fingerprints of any surface or solid object by taking the eigenvalues of its respective Laplace-Beltrami operator. Since the spectrum is an isometry invariant it is independent of the objects representation including parametrization, spatial position and of its representation (e.g. NURBS or any parametrized or implicitly represented surface or even for polyhedra). Therefore checking if two objects are isometric needs no prior alignment (registration / localization) of the objects, but only a comparison of their (normalized) spectra, the Shape-DNA.
In this paper we describe the computation of the Shape-DNA and their comparison. We also give an overview on implementation issues like meshing, numerics and the used "Atlas" data structure allowing principally to compute eigenvalues of topologically complex objects by gluing surface patches. Exploiting the isometry invariance of the Laplace-Beltrami operator we succeed in computing eigenvalues for smoothly bounded objects without discretization errors caused by approximation of the boundary.
Furthermore we show the rapid convergence of the heat trace series and demonstrate that it is computationally feasible to extract geometrical data such as the volume, the boundary length and even the Euler characteristic from the numerically calculated fingerprint data. This fact not only confirms the exactness of our computed eigenvalues, but also underlines the geometrical importance of the spectrum.
With the help of the here described Shape-DNA it is possible to support copyright protection, database retrieval and quality assessment of digital data representing surfaces and solids.