  Establishing correspondence between shapes is a fundamental problem in
geometry processing, arising in a wide variety of applications. The problem is
especially difficult in the setting of non-isometric deformations, as well as
in the presence of topological noise and missing parts, mainly due to the
limited capability to model such deformations axiomatically. Several recent
works showed that invariance to complex shape transformations can be learned
from examples. In this paper, we introduce an intrinsic convolutional neural
network architecture based on anisotropic diffusion kernels, which we term
Anisotropic Convolutional Neural Network (ACNN). In our construction, we
generalize convolutions to non-Euclidean domains by constructing a set of
oriented anisotropic diffusion kernels, creating in this way a local intrinsic
polar representation of the data (`patch'), which is then correlated with a
filter. Several cascades of such filters, linear, and non-linear operators are
stacked to form a deep neural network whose parameters are learned by
minimizing a task-specific cost. We use ACNNs to effectively learn intrinsic
dense correspondences between deformable shapes in very challenging settings,
achieving state-of-the-art results on some of the most difficult recent
correspondence benchmarks.
