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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-271-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Shape Representation using Gaussian Process mixture models</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Sapoutzoglou</surname>
<given-names>Panagiotis</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Terzakis</surname>
<given-names>George</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Floros</surname>
<given-names>Georgios</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pateraki</surname>
<given-names>Maria</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Laboratory of Photogrammetry, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>23</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B2-2026</volume>
<fpage>271</fpage>
<lpage>278</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Panagiotis Sapoutzoglou et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/271/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-271-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/271/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-271-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/271/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-271-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B2-2026/271/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B2-2026-271-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Traditional explicit 3D representations, such as point clouds and meshes, demand significant storage to capture fine geometric details and require complex indexing systems for surface lookups, making functional representations an efficient, compact, and continuous alternative. In this work, we propose a novel, object-specific functional shape representation that models surface geometry with Gaussian Process (GP) mixture models. Rather than relying on computationally heavy neural architectures, our method is lightweight, leveraging GPs to learn continuous directional distance fields from sparsely sampled point clouds. We capture complex topologies by anchoring local GP priors at strategic reference points, which can be flexibly extracted using any structural decomposition method (e.g. skeletonization, distance-based clustering). Extensive evaluations on the ShapeNetCore and IndustryShapes datasets demonstrate that our method can efficiently and accurately represent complex geometries.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="8"/></counts>
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