Improving Neural Network Surface Processing with Principal Curvatures
Keywords: geometric deep learning, geometry processing, shape analysis, discrete differential geometry
TL;DR: Neural networks architectures designed to process surfaces can be improved by representing input surfaces via principal curvature
Abstract: The modern study and use of surfaces is a research topic grounded in centuries of mathematical and empirical inquiry. From a mathematical point of view, curvature is an invariant that characterises the intrinsic geometry and the extrinsic shape of a surface. Yet, in modern applications the focus has shifted away from finding expressive representations of surfaces, and towards the design of efficient neural network architectures to process them. The literature suggests a tendency to either overlook the representation of the processed surface, or use overcomplicated representations whose ability to capture the essential features of a surface is opaque. We propose using curvature as the input of neural network architectures for surface processing, and explore this proposition through experiments making use of the shape operator. Our results show that using curvature as input leads to significant a increase in performance on segmentation and classification tasks, while allowing far less computational overhead than current methods.
Primary Area: Machine vision
Flagged For Ethics Review: true
Submission Number: 17689
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