Miao et al. / J Zhejiang Univ-Sci C (Comput & Electron) 2014 15(9):744-753 744
Visual salience guided feature-aware shape simplification
*
Yong-wei MIAO
†1
, Fei-xia HU
1
, Min-yan CHEN
1
, Zhen LIU
2
, Hua-hao SHOU
2
(
1
College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China)
(
2
College of Science, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou 310023, China)
†
E-mail: ywmiao@zjut.edu.cn
Received Mar. 18, 2014; Revision accepted July 26, 2014; Crosschecked Aug. 19, 2014
Abstract: In the area of 3D digital engineering and 3D digital geometry processing, shape simplification is an important task to
reduce their requirement of large memory and high time complexity. By incorporating the content-aware visual salience measure
of a polygonal mesh into simplification operation, a novel feature-aware shape simplification approach is presented in this paper.
Owing to the robust extraction of relief heights on 3D highly detailed meshes, our visual salience measure is defined by a
center-surround operator on Gaussian-weighted relief heights in a scale-dependent manner. Guided by our visual salience map, the
feature-aware shape simplification algorithm can be performed by weighting the high-dimensional feature space quadric error
metric of vertex pair contractions with the weight map derived from our visual salience map. The weighted quadric error metric is
calculated in a six-dimensional feature space by combining the position and normal information of mesh vertices. Experimental
results demonstrate that our visual salience guided shape simplification scheme can adaptively and effectively re-sample the
underlying models in a feature-aware manner, which can account for the visually salient features of the complex shapes and thus
yield better visual fidelity.
Key words: Visual salience, Shape simplification, Content-aware, Weighted quadric error metric, Feature-aware
doi:10.1631/jzus.C1400097 Document code: A CLC number: TP391.7
1 Introduction
Large scale sampled data of complex highly de-
tailed shapes always exhibits a large proportion of
redundant information due to the uniform sampling of
common 3D automatic scanning devices (Luebke et
al., 2003; Botsch et al., 2007). Such complex 3D
models often incur some difficulties due to their re-
quirement of large memory and high time complexity
in both shape modeling and real-time rendering
(Luebke, 2001; Luebke et al., 2003), such as rapid
prototype reconstruction in industry design, remote
transmission in virtual reality, and real-time perfor-
mance in digital entertainment. To overcome these
difficulties, shape simplification and re-sampling
schemes provide some efficient solutions for shape
modeling and rendering tasks (Luebke, 2001; Xiao et
al., 2009; Miao et al., 2012a; 2012b). In particular,
feature-aware shape simplification techniques satisfy
the need for maintaining intrinsic shape features with
high visual fidelity during the data reducing operation
(van Kaick and Pedrini, 2006).
By incorporating the visual salience measure into
the shape re-sampling operation, a novel salience
guided mesh simplification technique is presented in
this paper. The relief heights of complex shapes are
extracted robustly, and the content-aware visual sa-
lience map can then be calculated in a scale-dependent
manner using a center-surround operator on Gaussian-
weighted relief heights. Guided by our salience
measure, the adaptive mesh re-sampling can be
performed during a series of vertex pair collapse
operations.
The main contribution of our work is that a novel
feature-aware shape simplification scheme is pre-
sented by pushing the influence of our content-aware
visual importance into the iterative contractions of
Journal of Zhejiang University-SCIENCE C (Computers & Electronics)
ISSN 1869-1951 (Print); ISSN 1869-196X (Online)
www.zju.edu.cn/jzus; www.springerlink.com
E-mail: jzus@zju.edu.cn
*
Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (No. 61272309) and the Key Laboratory of Visual Media Intel-
ligent Process Technology of Zhejiang Province, China (No.
2011E10003)
© Zhejiang University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014