A hybrid approach to feature segmentation of triangle meshes

Segmentation of a polygonal mesh is a method of breaking the mesh down into 'meaningful' connected subsets of meshes called regions or features. Several methods have been proposed in the past and they are either vertex based or edge based. The vertex 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 [9,10]. Its main drawback is that it is a vertex based method and no hard boundaries (edges) are created for the features or regions. Edge based methods rely on the dihedral angle between polygon faces to determine if the common edge should be classified as a Feature Edge. However, this method results in many disconnected edges and thereby incomplete feature loops. We propose a hybrid method which takes advantage of both methods mentioned earlier and create regions with complete feature loops. Satisfactory results have been achieved for both CAD parts as well as other laser scanned objects such as bones and ceramic vessels.