Automatic 3D Teeth Semantic Segmentation with Mesh Augmentation Network

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an approach that improves segmentation networks with automatic augmentation networks for dental mesh data. Since conventional data augmentation is to augment all samples uniformly with predefined parameters, it ignores the unique characteristics of a single tooth sample and cannot make good use of the data set. And the traditional method separates data augmentation and segmentation network training, so the augmented data cannot be well adapted to the network to make it play a good role. We adopt a joint optimization strategy to integrate the augmentation network and the segmentation network, so that the augmented tooth data is the most suitable for the segmentation network. In addition, we design new improved loss functions suitable for augmentation and segmentation networks. Experiments have shown that the automatic augmentation network in our proposed method, named MeshAugNet, can effectively improve the segmentation accuracy after it is used for tooth segmentation. In general, this work achieves a combination of 3D dental data auto- augmentation network and segmentation network, which improves the accuracy of tooth segmentation, and can be used to solve the problem of too few samples in tooth datasets.