Perceptual-saliency extremum lines for 3D shape illustration

Owing to their efficiency for conveying perceptual information of the underlying shape and their pleasing perceiving in visual aesthetics experience, line drawings are now becoming a widely used technique for illustrating 3D shapes. Using a center-surrounding bilateral filter operator on Gaussian-weighted average of local projection height between mesh vertices and their neighbors, a new perceptual-saliency measure which can depict surface salient features, is proposed in this paper. Due to the definition of perceptual-saliency measure, our perceptual-saliency extremum lines can be considered as the ridge-valley lines of perceptual-saliency measure along the principal curvature directions on triangular meshes. The experimental results demonstrate that these extremum lines effectively capture and depict 3D shape information visually, especially for archaeological artifacts.