Face-Based CNN on Triangular Mesh with Arbitrary Connectivity

Applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to triangular meshes has always been a challenging task. Because of the complex structure of the meshes, most of the existing methods apply CNNs indirectly to them, and require complex preprocessing or transformation of the meshes. In this paper, we prop...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hui Wang, Yu Guo, Zhengyou Wang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022-08-01
Series:Electronics
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/11/15/2466
Description
Summary:Applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to triangular meshes has always been a challenging task. Because of the complex structure of the meshes, most of the existing methods apply CNNs indirectly to them, and require complex preprocessing or transformation of the meshes. In this paper, we propose a novel face-based CNN, which can be directly applied to triangular meshes with arbitrary connectivity by defining face convolution and pooling. The proposed approach takes each face of the meshes as the basic element, similar to CNNs with pixels of 2D images. First, the intrinsic features of the faces are used as the input features of the network. Second, a sort convolution operation with adjustable convolution kernel sizes is constructed to extract the face features. Third, we design an approximately uniform pooling operation by learnable face collapse, which can be applied to the meshes with arbitrary connectivity, and we directly use its inverse operation as unpooling. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach is comparable to, or can even outperform, state-of-the-art methods in mesh classification and mesh segmentation.
ISSN:2079-9292