Segmenting salient objects in 3D point clouds of indoor scenes using geodesic distances

Visual attention mechanisms allow humans to extract relevant and important information from raw input percepts. Many applications in robotics and computer vision have modeled human visual attention mechanisms using a bottom-up data centric approach. In contrast, recent studies in cognitive science highlight advantages of a top-down approach to the attention mechanisms, especially in applications involving goal-directed search. In this paper, we propose a top-down approach for extracting salient objects/regions of space. The top-down methodology first isolates different objects in an unorganized point cloud, and compares each object for uniqueness. A measure of saliency using the properties of geodesic distance on the object’s surface is defined. Our method works on 3D point cloud data, and identifies salient objects of high curvature and unique silhouette. These being the most unique features of a scene, are robust to clutter, occlusions and view point changes. We provide the details of the proposed method and initial experimental results.