Vertex saliency computation from 3D facial meshes

This paper presents a novel method to compute vertex saliency from 3D facial meshes. Among the many descriptors for vertices, Spin-image correlation and curvature are used based on competition and cooperation mechanisms. The proposed method has been tested on the IAIR-3Dface Database for evaluating the generated salient regions on 3D facial meshes. Experimental results demonstrate that both the abundance ratio and accuracy of the salient regions can be improved by the cooperation mechanisms compared to the competition mechanisms.