Improved Curvature Estimation for Watershed Segmentation of 3-Dimensional Meshes

Segmentation of a 3-dimensional (3D) polygonal mesh is a method of breaking the mesh down into \meaningful" connected subsets of vertices called regions. The method used here is based on the watershed segmentation scheme which appears prominently in the image segmentation literature and was later applied to the 3D segmentation problem. The watershed algorithm is based on a scalar value (curvature) assigned to every mesh vertex which purports to capture some essence of the local mesh shape. Accuracy of the curvature estimate at mesh vertices is critical to the quality of the resulting segmentation. The basis of this paper is one such watershed based 3D mesh segmentation scheme, described in [17], wherein two discrete curvature estimation schemes were used, i.e. the curvature was extracted directly from the mesh geometry. This paper considerably improves on the quality of segmentation in the original paper primarily by applying more accurate and robust curvature estimation techniques. The results are illustrated on data sets which are inherently noisy, such as the ones obtained from laser digitizers.