Context-Aware 3D Points of Interest Detection via Spatial Attention Mechanism

Detecting points of interest is a fundamental problem in 3D shape analysis and can be beneficial to various tasks in multimedia processing. Traditional learning-based detection methods usually rely on each vertex's geometric features to discriminate points of interest from other vertices. Observing that points of interest are related to not only geometric features on themselves but also the geometric features of surrounding vertices, we propose a novel context-aware 3D points of interest detection algorithm by adopting the spatial attention mechanism in this article. By designing a context attention module, our approach presents a novel deep neural network to simultaneously pay attention to the geometric features of vertices and their local contexts during extracting points of interest. To obtain satisfactory extraction results, our method adaptively assigns different weights to those features in a data-driven way. Extensive experimental results on SHREC 2007, SHREC 2011, and SHREC 2014 datasets show that our algorithm achieves superior performance over existing methods.