Anisotropic Geodesics for Live-wire Mesh Segmentation

Abstract

We present an interactive method for mesh segmentation that is inspired by the classical live-wire interaction for image segmentation. The core contribution of the work is the definition and computation of wires on surfaces that are likely to lie at segment boundaries. We define wires as geodesics in a new tensor-based anisotropic metric, which improves upon previous metrics in stability and feature-awareness. We further introduce a simple but effective mesh embedding approach that allows geodesic paths in an anisotropic path to be computed efficiently using existing algorithms designed for Euclidean geodesics. Our tool is particularly suited for delineating segmentation boundaries that are aligned with features or curvature directions, and we demonstrate its use in creating artist-guided segmentations.