Patent 7358978 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on April, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An approach for morphing between planar shapes is disclosed. Correspondences are established between perceptual feature points that are extracted from both source and target shapes. A similarity metric between two feature points is defined using the intrinsic properties of their local neighborhoods. The optimal correspondence is found by an efficient dynamic programming technique. This approach treats shape noise by allowing the discarding of small feature points, which introduces skips in the traversal of the dynamic programming graph. Intermediate shapes are obtained by interpolating the overall shapes constructed by feature points and the detailed information of the shapes respectively.