S‐ACORD: Spectral Analysis of COral Reef Deformation

Abstract We propose an efficient pipeline to register, detect, and analyze changes in 3D models of coral reefs captured over time. Corals have complex structures with intricate geometric features at multiple scales. 3D reconstructions of corals (e.g., using Photogrammetry) are represented by dense triangle meshes with millions of vertices. Hence, identifying correspondences quickly using conventional state‐of‐the‐art algorithms is challenging. To address this gap we employ the Globally Optimal Iterative Closest Point (GO‐ICP) algorithm to compute correspondences, and a fast approximation algorithm (FastSpectrum) to extract the eigenvectors of the Laplace‐Beltrami operator for creating functional maps. Finally, by visualizing the distortion of these maps we identify changes in the coral reefs over time. Our approach is fully automatic, does not require user specified landmarks or an initial map, and surpasses competing shape correspondence methods on coral reef models. Furthermore, our analysis has detected the changes manually marked by humans, as well as additional changes at a smaller scale that were missed during manual inspection. We have additionally used our system to analyse a coral reef model that was too extensive for manual analysis, and validated that the changes identified by the system were correct.