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A Machine-Learning Approach to Keypoint Detection and Landmarking on 3D Meshes

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Abstract

We address the problem of automatically detecting a sparse set of 3D mesh vertices, likely to be good candidates for determining correspondences, even on soft organic objects. We focus on 3D face scans, on which single local shape descriptor responses are known to be weak, sparse or noisy. Our machine-learning approach consists of computing feature vectors containing \(D\) different local surface descriptors. These vectors are normalized with respect to the learned distribution of those descriptors for some given target shape (landmark) of interest. Then, an optimal function of this vector is extracted that best separates this particular target shape from its surrounding region within the set of training data. We investigate two alternatives for this optimal function: a linear method, namely Linear Discriminant Analysis, and a non-linear method, namely AdaBoost. We evaluate our approach by landmarking 3D face scans in the FRGC v2 and Bosphorus 3D face datasets. Our system achieves state-of-the-art performance while being highly generic.

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Notes

  1. Also called interest points or feature detections in other literature.

  2. It is essential that the reader distinguishes carefully between unlabeled keypoints and labeled landmarks throughout this paper.

  3. To be more precise, a query scan point close to an extracted keypoint is sometimes designated to be the landmark, in order to minimize the least-squares error when fitting model \(\mathcal{L }\). This is discussed in Sect. 6.

  4. We define a scalar local shape descriptor as a real number that describes the shape of the local neighborhood surrounding some mesh vertex. In some literature, this is termed a feature or feature descriptor. Here, the local neighborhood is Euclidean and enclosed by a sphere of predefined radius.

  5. Subsets \(R\_90\), \(L\_90\) and \(IGN\) of the Bosphorus dataset are not used in this paper.

  6. Note, however, that our framework allows us to ‘plug in’ and use any classifier as an L-score generator. Switching to another technique is straightforward, if there is some advantage to this, in terms of the class of meshes that are being processed.

  7. http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~creusot.

  8. http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~creusot.

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Correspondence to Clement Creusot.

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Creusot, C., Pears, N. & Austin, J. A Machine-Learning Approach to Keypoint Detection and Landmarking on 3D Meshes. Int J Comput Vis 102, 146–179 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11263-012-0605-9

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