title: Automatic Tooth Segmentation of Dental Mesh Based on Harmonic Fields.
abstract: An important preprocess in computer-aided orthodontics is to segment teeth from the dental models accurately, which should involve manual interactions as few as possible. But fully automatic partition of all teeth is not a trivial task, since teeth occur in different shapes and their arrangements vary substantially from one individual to another. The difficulty is exacerbated when severe teeth malocclusion and crowding problems occur, which is a common occurrence in clinical cases. Most published methods in this area either are inaccurate or require lots of manual interactions. Motivated by the state-of-the-art general mesh segmentation methods that adopted the theory of harmonic field to detect partition boundaries, this paper proposes a novel, dental-targeted segmentation framework for dental meshes. With a specially designed weighting scheme and a strategy of a priori knowledge to guide the assignment of harmonic constraints, this method can identify teeth partition boundaries effectively. Extensive experiments and quantitative analysis demonstrate that the proposed method is able to partition high-quality teeth automatically with robustness and efficiency.
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
authors.forename: Sheng-hui
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Liao
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
authors.forename: Shi-jian
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
authors.forename: Bei-ji
authors.initials: BJ
authors.lastname: Zou
authors.affiliation: Department of Stomatology, First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou 325000, China.
authors.forename: Xi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Ding
authors.affiliation: Department of Stomatology, Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha 410008, China.
authors.forename: Ye
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.affiliation: Xiangya Stomatological Hospital of Central South University, Changsha 410008, China.
authors.forename: Jun-hui
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D003196:Computer Graphics; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D003765:Models, Dental; D014070:Tooth / Q000033:anatomy & histology*