Shape segmentation using medial point clouds with applications to dental cast analysis

We present an automatic surface segmentation method for dental cast scans based on the point density properties of the surface skeleton of such shapes. We produce quasi-flat segments separated by soft ridges, in contrast to classical surface segmentation methods that require sharp ridges. We compute the surface skeleton by a fast 3D skeletonization technique followed by its regularization using surface geodesics. We segment the resulting skeleton by a mean-shift approach and transfer the segmentation results back to the surface. We demonstrate our results on an industrial dental-cast segmentation application and several generic 3D shape models.