SurfNet: Learning Surface Representations via Graph Convolutional Network

For scientific visualization applications, understanding the structure of a single surface (e.g., stream surface, isosurface) and selecting representative surfaces play a crucial role. In response, we propose SurfNet, a graph-based deep learning approach for representing a surface locally at the node level and globally at the surface level. By treating surfaces as graphs, we leverage a graph convolutional network to learn node embedding on a surface. To make the learned embedding effective, we consider various pieces of information (e.g., position, normal, velocity) for network input and investigate multiple losses. Furthermore, we apply dimensionality reduction to transform the learned embeddings into 2D space for understanding and exploration. To demonstrate the effectiveness of SurfNet, we evaluate the embeddings in node clustering (node-level) and surface selection (surface-level) tasks. We compare SurfNet against state-of-the-art node embedding approaches and surface selection methods. We also demonstrate the superiority of SurfNet by comparing it against a spectral-based mesh segmentation approach. The results show that SurfNet can learn better representations at the node and surface levels with less training time and fewer training samples while generating comparable or better clustering and selection results.