Mesh analysis using geodesic mean-shift

In this paper, we introduce a versatile and robust method for analyzing the feature space associated with a given mesh surface. The method is based on the mean-shift operator, which was shown to be successful in image and video processing. Its strength lies in the fact that it works in a single joint space of geometry and attributes called the feature-space. The mean-shift procedure works as a gradient ascend finding maxima of an estimated probability density function in feature-space. Our method for using the mean-shift technique on surfaces solves several difficulties. First, meshes as opposed to images do not present a regular and uniform sampling of domain. Second, on surface meshes the shifting procedure must be constrained to stay on the surface and preserve geodesic distances. We define a special local geodesic parameterization scheme, and use it to generalize the mean-shift procedure to unstructured surface meshes. Our method can support piecewise linear attribute definitions as well as piecewise constant attributes.