3D Keypoint Detection Based on Deep Neural Network with Sparse Autoencoder

Researchers have proposed various methods to extract 3D keypoints from the surface of 3D mesh models over the last decades, but most of them are based on geometric methods, which lack enough flexibility to meet the requirements for various applications. In this paper, we propose a new method on the basis of deep learning by formulating the 3D keypoint detection as a regression problem using deep neural network (DNN) with sparse autoencoder (SAE) as our regression model. Both local information and global information of a 3D mesh model in multi-scale space are fully utilized to detect whether a vertex is a keypoint or not. SAE can effectively extract the internal structure of these two kinds of information and formulate high-level features for them, which is beneficial to the regression model. Three SAEs are used to formulate the hidden layers of the DNN and then a logistic regression layer is trained to process the high-level features produced in the third SAE. Numerical experiments show that the proposed DNN based 3D keypoint detection algorithm outperforms current five state-of-the-art methods for various 3D mesh models.