Salient Clustering for View-dependent Multiresolution Rendering

Perceptual information is quickly gaining importance in mesh representation, analysis and rendering. User studies, eye tracking and other techniques are able to provide ever more useful insights for many user-centric systems, which form the bulk of computer graphics applications. In this work we build upon the concept of Mesh Saliency - an automatic measure of visual importance for triangle meshes based on models of low-level human visual attention - applying it to the problem of mesh segmentation and view-dependent rendering. We introduce a technique for segmentation that partitions an object into a set of face clusters, each encompassing a group of locally interesting features; Mesh Saliency is incorporated in a propagative mesh clustering framework, guiding cluster seed selection and triangle propagation costs and leading to a convergence of face clusters around perceptually important features. We compare our technique with different fully automatic segmentation algorithms, showing that it provides similar or better segmentation without the need for user input. We illustrate application of our clustering results through a saliency-guided view-dependent rendering system, achieving significant frame rate increases with little loss of visual detail.