Robust Temporally Coherent Laplacian Protrusion Segmentation of 3D Articulated Bodies

In motion analysis and understanding it is important to be able to fit a suitable model or structure to the temporal series of observed data, in order to describe motion patterns in a compact way, and to discriminate between them. In an unsupervised context, i.e., no prior model of the moving object(s) is available, such a structure has to be learned from the data in a bottom-up fashion. In recent times, volumetric approaches in which the motion is captured from a number of cameras and a voxel-set representation of the body is built from the camera views, have gained ground due to attractive features such as inherent view-invariance and robustness to occlusions. Automatic, unsupervised segmentation of moving bodies along entire sequences, in a temporally-coherent and robust way, has the potential to provide a means of constructing a bottom-up model of the moving body, and track motion cues that may be later exploited for motion classification. Spectral methods such as locally linear embedding (LLE) can be useful in this context, as they preserve "protrusions", i.e., high-curvature regions of the 3D volume, of articulated shapes, while improving their separation in a lower dimensional space, making them in this way easier to cluster. In this paper we therefore propose a spectral approach to unsupervised and temporally-coherent body-protrusion segmentation along time sequences. Volumetric shapes are clustered in an embedding space, clusters are propagated in time to ensure coherence, and merged or split to accommodate changes in the body's topology. Experiments on both synthetic and real sequences of dense voxel-set data are shown. This supports the ability of the proposed method to cluster body-parts consistently over time in a totally unsupervised fashion, its robustness to sampling density and shape quality, and its potential for bottom-up model constructionComment: 31 pages, 26 figure

PetroSurf3D - A Dataset for high-resolution 3D Surface Segmentation

The development of powerful 3D scanning hardware and reconstruction algorithms has strongly promoted the generation of 3D surface reconstructions in different domains. An area of special interest for such 3D reconstructions is the cultural heritage domain, where surface reconstructions are generated to digitally preserve historical artifacts. While reconstruction quality nowadays is sufficient in many cases, the robust analysis (e.g. segmentation, matching, and classification) of reconstructed 3D data is still an open topic. In this paper, we target the automatic and interactive segmentation of high-resolution 3D surface reconstructions from the archaeological domain. To foster research in this field, we introduce a fully annotated and publicly available large-scale 3D surface dataset including high-resolution meshes, depth maps and point clouds as a novel benchmark dataset to the community. We provide baseline results for our existing random forest-based approach and for the first time investigate segmentation with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on the data. Results show that both approaches have complementary strengths and weaknesses and that the provided dataset represents a challenge for future research.Comment: CBMI Submission; Dataset and more information can be found at http://lrs.icg.tugraz.at/research/petroglyphsegmentation