Representing 3D texture on mesh manifolds for retrieval and recognition applications

In this paper, we present and experiment a novel approach for representing texture of 3D mesh manifolds using local binary patterns (LBP). Using a recently proposed framework [37], we compute LBP directly on the mesh surface, either using geometric or photometric appearance. Compared to its depth-image counterpart, our approach is distinguished by the following features: a) inherits the intrinsic advantages of mesh surface (e.g., preservation of the full geometry); b) does not require normalization; c) can accommodate partial matching. In addition, it allows early-level fusion of the geometry and photometric texture modalities. Through experiments conducted on two application scenarios, namely, 3D texture retrieval and 3D face recognition, we assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution with respect to state of the art approaches.