From 3D Point Clouds to Pose-Normalised Depth Maps

We consider the problem of generating either pairwise-aligned or pose-normalised depth maps from noisy 3D point clouds in a relatively unrestricted poses. Our system is deployed in a 3D face alignment application and consists of the following four stages: (i) data filtering, (ii) nose tip identification and sub-vertex localisation, (iii) computation of the (relative) face orientation, (iv) generation of either a pose aligned or a pose normalised depth map. We generate an implicit radial basis function (RBF) model of the facial surface and this is employed within all four stages of the process. For example, in stage (ii), construction of novel invariant features is based on sampling this RBF over a set of concentric spheres to give a spherically-sampled RBF (SSR) shape histogram. In stage (iii), a second novel descriptor, called an isoradius contour curvature signal, is defined, which allows rotational alignment to be determined using a simple process of 1D correlation. We test our system on both the University of York (UoY) 3D face dataset and the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 3D data. For the more challenging UoY data, our SSR descriptors significantly outperform three variants of spin images, successfully identifying nose vertices at a rate of 99.6%. Nose localisation performance on the higher quality FRGC data, which has only small pose variations, is 99.9%. Our best system successfully normalises the pose of 3D faces at rates of 99.1% (UoY data) and 99.6% (FRGC data)

Data-Driven Shape Analysis and Processing

Data-driven methods play an increasingly important role in discovering geometric, structural, and semantic relationships between 3D shapes in collections, and applying this analysis to support intelligent modeling, editing, and visualization of geometric data. In contrast to traditional approaches, a key feature of data-driven approaches is that they aggregate information from a collection of shapes to improve the analysis and processing of individual shapes. In addition, they are able to learn models that reason about properties and relationships of shapes without relying on hard-coded rules or explicitly programmed instructions. We provide an overview of the main concepts and components of these techniques, and discuss their application to shape classification, segmentation, matching, reconstruction, modeling and exploration, as well as scene analysis and synthesis, through reviewing the literature and relating the existing works with both qualitative and numerical comparisons. We conclude our report with ideas that can inspire future research in data-driven shape analysis and processing.Comment: 10 pages, 19 figure

Salient Local 3D Features for 3D Shape Retrieval

In this paper we describe a new formulation for the 3D salient local features based on the voxel grid inspired by the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). We use it to identify the salient keypoints (invariant points) on a 3D voxelized model and calculate invariant 3D local feature descriptors at these keypoints. We then use the bag of words approach on the 3D local features to represent the 3D models for shape retrieval. The advantages of the method are that it can be applied to rigid as well as to articulated and deformable 3D models. Finally, this approach is applied for 3D Shape Retrieval on the McGill articulated shape benchmark and then the retrieval results are presented and compared to other methods.Comment: Three-Dimensional Imaging, Interaction, and Measurement. Edited by Beraldin, J. Angelo; Cheok, Geraldine S.; McCarthy, Michael B.; Neuschaefer-Rube, Ulrich; Baskurt, Atilla M.; McDowall, Ian E.; Dolinsky, Margaret. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 7864, pp. 78640S-78640S-8 (2011). Conference Location: San Francisco Airport, California, USA ISBN: 9780819484017 Date: 10 March 201