Topological approaches for 3D object processing and applications

The great challenge in 3D object processing is to devise computationally efficient algorithms for recovering 3D models contaminated by noise and preserving their geometrical structure. The first problem addressed in this thesis is object denoising formulated in the discrete variational framework. We introduce a 3D mesh denoising method based on kernel density estimation. The proposed approach is able to reduce the over-smoothing effect and effectively remove undesirable noise while preserving prominent geometric features of a 3D mesh such as sharp features and fine details. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated through extensive experiments. The rest of the thesis is devoted to a joint exploitation of geometry and topology of 3D objects for as parsimonious as possible representation of models and its subsequent application in object modeling, compression, and hashing problems. We introduce a 3D mesh compression technique using the centroidal mesh neighborhood information. The key idea is to apply eigen-decomposition to the mesh umbrella matrix, and then discard the smallest eigenvalues/eigenvectors in order to reduce the dimensionality of the new spectral basis so that most of the energy is concentrated in the low frequency coefficients. We also present a hashing technique for 3D models using spectral graph theory and entropic spanning trees by partitioning a 3D triangle mesh into an ensemble of submeshes, and then applying eigen-decomposition to the Laplace-Beltrami matrix of each sub-mesh, followed by computing the hash value of each sub-mesh. Moreover, we introduce several statistical distributions to analyze the topological properties of 3D objects. These probabilistic distributions provide useful information about the way 3D mesh models are connected. Illustrating experiments with synthetic and real data are provided to demonstrate the feasibility and the much improved performance of the proposed approaches in 3D object compression, hashing, and modeling

Geometric Approaches for 3D Shape Denoising and Retrieval

A key issue in developing an accurate 3D shape recognition system is to design an efficient shape descriptor for which an index can be built, and similarity queries can be answered efficiently. While the overwhelming majority of prior work on 3D shape analysis has concentrated primarily on rigid shape retrieval, many real objects such as articulated motions of humans are nonrigid and hence can exhibit a variety of poses and deformations. Motivated by the recent surge of interest in content-based analysis of 3D objects in computeraided design and multimedia computing, we develop in this thesis a unified theoretical and computational framework for 3D shape denoising and retrieval by incorporating insights gained from algebraic graph theory and spectral geometry. We first present a regularized kernel diffusion for 3D shape denoising by solving partial differential equations in the weighted graph-theoretic framework. Then, we introduce a computationally fast approach for surface denoising using the vertexcentered finite volume method coupled with the mesh covariance fractional anisotropy. Additionally, we propose a spectral-geometric shape skeleton for 3D object recognition based on the second eigenfunction of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in a bid to capture the global and local geometry of 3D shapes. To further enhance the 3D shape retrieval accuracy, we introduce a graph matching approach by assigning geometric features to each endpoint of the shape skeleton. Extensive experiments are carried out on two 3D shape benchmarks to assess the performance of the proposed shape retrieval framework in comparison with state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that the proposed shape descriptor delivers best-in-class shape retrieval performance