Simple and efficient algorithm for part decomposition of 3-D triangulated models based on curvature analysis

This paper presents a simple and efficient algorithm for part decomposition of compound objects based on Gaussian curvature analysis. The proposed algorithm consists of three major steps, Gaussian curvature estimation, boundary detection, and region growing. Boundaries between two articulated parts are composed of points with highly negative curvature based on the transversality regularity. These boundaries are therefore detected by thresholding estimated Gaussian curvatures for each vertex. A component labeling operation is then performed to grow non-boundary vertices into parts. The original contributions of this paper include: (i) novel, curvature analysis-based decomposition of 3-D models represented by triangle meshes into functional parts instead of surfaces and (ii) large mesh (over 100,000 triangles) handling capability with low computational cost and easy implementation. Experiments were conducted on a large number of both synthetic and real 3-D models. Experimental results demonstrated the performance and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.