High-level shape understanding and technique evaluation on large repositories of 3D shapes often benefit from additional information known about the shapes. One example of such information is the semantic segmentation of a shape into functional or meaningful parts. Generating accurate segmentations with meaningful segment boundaries is, however, a costly process, typically requiring large amounts of user time to achieve high quality results. In this paper we present an active learning framework for large dataset segmentation, which iteratively provides the user with new predictions by training new models based on already segmented shapes. Our proposed pipeline consists of three novel components. First, we a propose a fast and relatively accurate feature-based deep learning model to provide dataset-wide segmentation predictions. Second, we propose an information theory measure to estimate the prediction quality and for ordering subsequent fast and meaningful shape selection. Our experiments show that such suggestive ordering helps reduce users time and effort, produce high quality predictions, and construct a model that generalizes well. Finally, we provide effective segmentation refinement features to help the user quickly correct any incorrect predictions. We show that our framework is more accurate and in general more efficient than state-of-the-art, for massive dataset segmentation with while also providing consistent segment boundaries.
Abstract There is an increasing interest in applying deep learning to 3D mesh segmentation. We observe that 1) existing feature-based techniques are often slow or sensitive to feature resizing, 2) there are minimal comparative studies and 3) techniques often suffer from reproducibility issue. This study contributes in two ways. First, we propose a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) for mesh segmentation. It uses 1D data, filters and a multi-branch architecture for separate training of multi-scale features. Together with a novel way of computing conformal factor (CF), our technique clearly out-performs existing work. Secondly, we publicly provide implementations of several deep learning techniques, namely, neural networks (NNs), autoencoders (AEs) and CNNs, whose architectures are at least two layers deep. The significance of this study is that it proposes a robust form of CF, offers a novel and accurate CNN technique, and a comprehensive study of several deep learning techniques for baseline comparison.