Towards Mesh Saliency Detection in 6 Degrees of Freedom

Abstract: Traditional 3D mesh saliency detection algorithms and corresponding databases were proposed under several constraints such as providing limited viewing directions and not taking the subject's movement into consideration. In this work, a novel 6DoF mesh saliency database is developed which provides both the subject's 6DoF data and eye-movement data. Different from traditional databases, subjects in the experiment are allowed to move freely to observe 3D meshes in a virtual reality environment. Based on the database, we first analyze the inter-observer variation and the influence of viewing direction towards subject's visual attention, then we provide further investigations about the subject's visual attention bias during observation. Furthermore, we propose a 6DoF mesh saliency detection algorithm based on the uniqueness measure and the bias preference. To evaluate the proposed approach, we also design an evaluation metric accordingly which takes the 6DoF information into consideration, and extend some state-of-the-art 3D saliency detection methods to make comparisons. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach for 6DoF mesh saliency detection, in addition to providing benchmarks for the presented 6DoF mesh saliency database. The database and the corresponding algorithms will be made publicly available for research purposes.