1. A process for characterizing global shape pattern of low-resolution, partial point clouds, the process comprising: receiving a partial point cloud representation of an object from a sensor; computing zero and first order geometric moments of the partial point cloud; computing a location of a center of a point cloud mass using the zero and first order geometric moments; generating a bounding box; dividing the bounding box into a three dimensional grid; generating a normalized voxel mass distribution over the three dimensional grid; calculating Tchebichef moments of different orders with respect to the voxel mass distribution in the grid; and collecting low-order moments to form a one-dimensional numerical vector containing 3D Tchebichef Moment Shape Descriptors (TMSD).