DEF: Deep Estimation of Sharp Geometric Features in 3D Shapes

Sharp feature lines carry essential information about human-made objects, enabling compact 3D shape representations, high-quality surface reconstruction, and are a signal source for mesh processing. While extracting high-quality lines from noisy and undersampled data is challenging for traditional methods, deep learning-powered algorithms can leverage global and semantic information from the training data to aid in the process. We propose Deep Estimators of Features (DEFs), a learning-based framework for predicting sharp geometric features in sampled 3D shapes. Differently from existing data-driven methods, which reduce this problem to feature classification, we propose to regress a scalar field representing the distance from point samples to the closest feature line on local patches. By fusing the result of individual patches, we can process large 3D models, which are impossible to process for existing data-driven methods due to their size and complexity. Extensive experimental evaluation of DEFs is implemented on synthetic and real-world 3D shape datasets and suggests advantages of our image- and point-based estimators over competitor methods, as well as improved noise robustness and scalability of our approach.