Automatic tooth segmentation of dental mesh using a transverse plane

Abstract

This paper proposes an automatic method to separate the gingiva and individual teeth from a dental mesh. We define a transverse plane that produces a cross-section of tooth lingual and labial surfaces, preserving the shape of individual teeth. The upper vertices from the transverse plane, which belong to the tooth, are projected onto the transverse plane, and partitioned into individual teeth. We apply region growing to the remaining non-segmented parts to determine the cluster the vertices belong to, and the proposed approach is fully automatic, i.e., segmentation does not require user interaction for feature point search or tooth boundary markers. The proposed segmentation method is applied to several dental mesh models to demonstrate its robustness.