Model based clustering for 3D directional features: Application to depth image analysis

Model Based Clustering (MBC) is a method that estimates a model for the data and produces probabilistic clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel MBC method to cluster three dimensional directional features. We assume that the features are generated from a finite statistical mixture model based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. The core elements of our proposed method are: (a) generate a set of vMF Mixture Models (vMFMM) and (b) select the optimal model using a parsimony based approach with information criteria. We empirically validate our proposed method by applying it on simulated data. Next, we apply it to cluster image normals in order to perform depth image analysis.