A Robust 3D Interest Points Detector Based on Harris Operator

With the increasing amount of 3D data and the ability of capture devices to produce low-cost multimedia data, the capability to select relevant information has become an interesting research field. In 3D objects, the aim is to detect a few salient structures which can be used, instead of the whole object, for applications like object registration, retrieval, and mesh simplification. In this paper, we present an interest points detector for 3D objects based on Harris operator, which has been used with good results in computer vision applications. We propose an adaptive technique to determine the neighborhood of a vertex, over which the Harris response on that vertex is calculated. Our method is robust to affine transformations(partially for object rotation) and distortion transformation such as noise addition. Moreover, the distribution of interest points on the surface of an object remains similar in transformed objects, which is a desirable behavior in applications such as shape matching and object registration.