Fast and Scalable Mesh Superfacets

Abstract

In the field of computer vision, the introduction of a low-level preprocessing step to oversegment images into superpixels - relatively small regions whose boundaries agree with those of the semantic entities in the scene - has enabled advances in segmentation by reducing the number of elements to be labeled from hundreds of thousands, or millions, to a just few hundred. While some recent works in mesh processing have used an analogous oversegmentation, they were not intended to be general and have relied on graph cut techniques that do not scale to current mesh sizes. Here, we present an iterative superfacet algorithm and introduce adaptations of undersegmentation error and compactness, which are well-motivated and principled metrics from the vision community. We demonstrate that our approach produces results comparable to those of the normalized cuts algorithm when evaluated on the Princeton Segmentation Benchmark, while requiring orders of magnitude less time and memory and easily scaling to, and enabling the processing of, much larger meshes.