Shape Terra: mechanical feature recognition based on a persistent heat signature

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a novel approach to recognizing mechanical features through a multiscale persistent heat signature similarity identification technique. First, heat signature is computed using a modified Laplacian in the application of the heat kernel. Regularly, matrices tend to include an indicator to the manifold curvature (the cotangent in our case), but we add a mesh uniformity factor to overcome mesh proportionality and skewness. Second, once heat retention values are computed, we apply persistent homology to extract significant subsets of the global mesh at different time intervals. Subsets are computed based on similarity of heat retention levels and/or retention values. Third, we present a multiscale persistence identification approach where we scan the part at different persistence levels to detect the presence of a feature. Once features are recognized and their geometrical descriptors identified, the next stage in future work will be feature matching.