Interactive tooth partition of dental mesh base on tooth-target harmonic field

Abstract

The accurate tooth partition of dental mesh is a crucial step in computer-aided orthodontics. However, tooth boundary identification is not a trivial task for tooth partition, since different shapes and their arrangements vary substantially among common clinical cases. Though curvature field is traditionally used for identifying boundaries, it is normally not reliable enough. Other methods may improve the accuracy, but require intensive user interaction. Motivated by state-of-the-art general interactive mesh segmentation methods, this paper proposes a novel tooth-target partition framework that employs harmonic fields to partition teeth accurately and effectively. In addition, a refining strategy is introduced to successfully segment teeth from the complicated dental model with indistinctive tooth boundaries on its lingual side surface, addressing an issue that had not been solved properly before. To utilise high-level information provided by the user, smart and intuitive user interfaces are also proposed with minimum interaction. In fact, most published interactive methods specifically designed for tooth partition are lacking efficient user interfaces. Extensive experiments and quantitative analyses show that our tooth partition method outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness and efficiency.