An Information-Theoretic Framework for Viewpoint Selection

Viewpoint selection is an emerging area in computer graphics with applications in fields such as scene understanding, volume visualization, image-based modeling, and molecular visualization. We present an integrated framework for viewpoint selection and mesh saliency based on the definition of an information channel between a set of viewpoints and the polygons of an object. The mutual information of this channel is a powerful tool to deal with viewpoint selection and to represent the visibility of a mesh. In addition, the Jensen-Shannon divergence, closely related to mutual information, gives us a measure of viewpoint similarity and permits us to obtain the saliency of an object.