Automatic Representative View Selection of a 3D Cultural Relic Using Depth Variation Entropy and Depth Distribution Entropy

Automatically selecting a set of representative views of a 3D virtual cultural relic is crucial for constructing wisdom museums. There is no consensus regarding the definition of a good view in computer graphics; the same is true of multiple views. View-based methods play an important role in the field of 3D shape retrieval and classification. However, it is still difficult to select views that not only conform to subjective human preferences but also have a good feature description. In this study, we define two novel measures based on information entropy, named depth variation entropy and depth distribution entropy. These measures were used to determine the amount of information about the depth swings and different depth quantities of each view. Firstly, a canonical pose 3D cultural relic was generated using principal component analysis. A set of depth maps obtained by orthographic cameras was then captured on the dense vertices of a geodesic unit-sphere by subdividing the regular unit-octahedron. Afterwards, the two measures were calculated separately on the depth maps gained from the vertices and the results on each one-eighth sphere form a group. The views with maximum entropy of depth variation and depth distribution were selected, and further scattered viewpoints were selected. Finally, the threshold word histogram derived from the vector quantization of salient local descriptors on the selected depth maps represented the 3D cultural relic. The viewpoints obtained by the proposed method coincided with an arbitrary pose of the 3D model. The latter eliminated the steps of manually adjusting the model’s pose and provided acceptable display views for people. In addition, it was verified on several datasets that the proposed method, which uses the Bag-of-Words mechanism and a deep convolution neural network, also has good performance regarding retrieval and classification when dealing with only four views.