The task of detecting the interest points in 3D meshes has typically been handled by geometric methods. These methods, while greatly describing human preference, can be ill-equipped for handling the variety and subjectivity in human responses. Different tasks have different requirements for interest point detection; some tasks may necessitate high precision while other tasks may require high recall. Sometimes points with high curvature may be desirable, while in other cases high curvature may be an indication of noise. Geometric methods lack the required flexibility to adapt to such changes. As a consequence, interest point detection seems to be well suited for machine learning methods that can be trained to match the criteria applied on the annotated training data. In this paper, we formulate interest point detection as a supervised binary classification problem using a random forest as our classifier. Among other challenges, we are faced with an imbalanced learning problem due to the substantial difference in the priors between interest and non-interest points. We address this by re-sampling the training set. We validate the accuracy of our method and compare our results to those of five state of the art methods on a new, standard benchmark.
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.