Segmenting Free-Form 3D Objects by a Function Representation in Spherical Coordinates

Segmenting 3D object surfaces is required for various high level computer vision and computer graphics applications. In computer vision, recognizing and estimating poses of 3D objects heavily depend on segmentation results. Similarly, physically meaningful segments of a 3D object may be useful in various computer graphics applications. Therefore, there are many segmentation algorithms proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, most of these algorithms can not perform reliably on freeform objects. In order to segment free-form objects, we introduce a novel method in this study. Different from previous segmentation methods, we first obtain a function representation of the object surface in spherical coordinates. This representation allows detecting smooth edges on the object surface easily by a zero crossing edge detector. Edge detection results lead to segments of the object. We test our method on diverse free-form 3D objects and provide the segmentation results.