Patch based saliency detection method for 3D surface simplification

The detection of salient regions from mesh surfaces is an important preprocessing step for many 3D applications, such as mesh simplification, registration, segmentation and compression, etc. The detected salient regions can facilitate the understanding of the structure and finding the regions/components that are important on 3D surfaces. This paper proposes a novel method for saliency detection by diffusing the shape index field with non-local means filter, generating a saliency map, that is further enhanced using Retinex approach. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by surface simplification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach has achieved better results than competitors.