  We suggest a novel shape matching algorithm for three-dimensional surface
meshes of disk or sphere topology. The method is based on the physical theory
of nonlinear elasticity and can hence handle large rotations and deformations.
Deformation boundary conditions that supplement the underlying equations are
usually unknown. Given an initial guess, these are optimized such that the
mechanical boundary forces that are responsible for the deformation are of a
simple nature. We show a heuristic way to approximate the nonlinear
optimization problem by a sequence of convex problems using finite elements.
The deformation cost, i.e, the forces, is measured on a coarse scale while
ICP-like matching is done on the fine scale. We demonstrate the plausibility of
our algorithm on examples taken from different datasets.
