Representing and analyzing relief patterns using LBP variants on mesh manifold

Extending the concept of texture to the geometry of a mesh manifold surface is an emerging topic in computer vision. This concept is different from gluing images to the surface, but rather indicates the presence of relief patterns that locally change the surface geometry, showing some regular and repetitive patterns. The representation and the analysis of such relief patterns have several potential applications. In this paper, we propose an original and comprehensive framework to address this novel task, which redefines a large variety of local binary patterns on the mesh manifold domain. We also propose an efficient mesh re-sampling technique that enables uniform surface tessellation. We assess the different descriptive variants derived with this framework in terms of uniformity, repeatability and discriminative power. Afterward, we conduct an extensive experimentation on different datasets showcasing the competitiveness of our framework in classification and retrieval tasks, in terms of both accuracy and computational complexity, with respect to state-of-the-art methods.