Fuzzy geodesics and consistent sparse correspondences for deformable shapes

A geodesic is a parameterized curve on a Riemannian manifold governed by a second order partial differential equation. Geodesics are notoriously unstable: small perturbations of the underlying manifold may lead to dramatic changes of the course of a geodesic. Such instability makes it difficult to use geodesics in many applications, in particular in the world of discrete geometry. In this paper, we consider a geodesic as the indicator function of the set of the points on the geodesic. From this perspective, we present a new concept called fuzzy geodesics and show that fuzzy geodesics are stable with respect to the Gromov-Hausdorff distance. Based on fuzzy geodesics, we propose a new object called the intersection configuration for a set of points on a shape and demonstrate its effectiveness in the application of finding consistent correspondences between sparse sets of points on shapes differing by extreme deformations.