Gmd: Gaussian mixture descriptor for pair matching of 3D fragments

arXiv cs.CV / 4/24/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper introduces GMD (Gaussian Mixture Descriptor), a new local descriptor for matching fractured surfaces when automatically reassembling 3D fragments from laser scans.
  • GMD fits a Gaussian Mixture Model to point distributions by first splitting a local surface patch into concave and convex regions to estimate the appropriate number of mixture components (k).
  • The final descriptor is built by merging the regional descriptors derived from the concave/convex partitioning of the fractured surface.
  • Similarity between fragment surfaces is computed using L2 distance, with fragment alignment performed via RANSAC and Iterative Closest Point (ICP).
  • Experiments on real-scanned public datasets, including Terracotta, show improved performance over existing methods, supporting the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

In the automatic reassembly of fragments acquired using laser scanners to reconstruct objects, a crucial step is the matching of fractured surfaces. In this paper, we propose a novel local descriptor that uses the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to fit the distribution of points, allowing for the description and matching of fractured surfaces of fragments. Our method involves dividing a local surface patch into concave and convex regions for estimating the k value of GMM. Then the final Gaussian Mixture Descriptor (GMD) of the fractured surface is formed by merging the regional GMDs. To measure the similarities between GMDs for determining adjacent fragments, we employ the L2 distance and align the fragments using Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) and Iterative Closest Point (ICP). The extensive experiments on real-scanned public datasets and Terracotta datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach; furthermore, the comparisons with several existing methods also validate the advantage of the proposed method.