Voxel-based shape decomposition for feature-preserving 3D thumbnail creation

In this work, we study the problem of voxel-based shape decomposition and simplification to create simplified 3D models, called 3D thumbnails, which preserve the salient features of their original models to facilitate users’ interactive browsing. The proposed method decomposes a 3D model into multiple parts and simplifies each decomposed part individually. In this process, a 3D model is first converted into a voxel-based shape representation and a rough skeleton is extracted using the thinning operation. Then, a skeleton refinement algorithm is proposed to fine-tune the thinned skeleton and decompose the skeleton into multiple groups. The remaining processing steps include: (1) taking body measurements of each part with PCA transformation and (2) creating the 3D thumbnail by primitive approximation. It is shown by experimental results that the proposed voxel-based scheme outperforms the mesh-based scheme in the sense that the resultant 3D thumbnail can preserve more features when it is greatly simplified.

► A voxel-based shape decomposition scheme for creating 3D thumbnails is proposed.
► The 3D model is decomposed into parts and each part is simplified individually.
► The research objective is to automatically create 3D thumbnails for large 3D database.
► A skeleton refinement approach that refines the thinned skeleton is presented.
► The result shows our voxel-based scheme outperforms the previous mesh-based scheme.