Robust and Fast 3-D Saliency Mapping for Industrial Modeling Applications

New generation 3-D scanning technologies are expected to create a revolution at the Industry 4.0, facilitating a large number of virtual manufacturing tools and systems. Such applications require the accurate representation of physical objects and/or systems achieved through saliency estimation mechanisms that identify certain areas of the 3-D model, leading to a meaningful and easier to analyze representation of a 3-D object. 3-D saliency mapping is, therefore, guiding the selection of feature locations and is adopted in a large number of low-level 3-D processing applications including denoising, compression, simplification, and registration. In this article, we propose a robust and fast method for creating 3-D saliency maps that accurately identifies sharp and small-scale geometric features in various industrial 3-D models. An extensive experimental study using a large number of 3-D scanned and CAD models verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to other recent and relevant approaches despite the constraints posed by complex geometry patterns or the presence of noise.