Active contour projection for mesh segmentation

Active contour methods can be used to segment a 3D mesh into parts by iteratively moving the contour to the mesh region that minimizes the contour energy. However, as the contour moves, it often does not lie on the mesh surface. To address this problem, existing methods use either vertex/edge projection or mesh parameterization to obtain the corresponding contour on the mesh surface. Although vertex/edge projection methods are simple, they may create unwanted loops along the projected contour due to irregular mesh connectivity or modeling noise. Extra operations, which are often complex, are needed to remove such loops. On the other hand, mesh parameterization suffers from distortion and out-of-range problems, which are not trivial to solve. In this paper, we propose a face projection method to address the above problems. Our experiments show that the proposed method produces much smoother and more accurate projected contours than existing methods.