Nearly convex segmentation of polyhedra through convex ridge separation

Decomposing a 3D model into approximately convex components has gained more attention recently due to its ability to efficiently generate small decomposition with controllable concavity bound. However, current methods are computationally expensive and require many user parameters. These parameters are usually unintuitive and add unnecessary obstacles in processing a large number of meshes and meshes that are generated online in applications such as video games. In this paper, we investigate an approach that decomposes a mesh P based on the identification of convex ridges. Intuitively, convex ridges are the protruding parts of the mesh P. Our method, called CORISE, extracts nearly convex components of P by separating each convex ridge from all the other convex ridges. Through the new concept of residual concavity CORISE requires only a single user parameter: concavity tolerance. We show that our method can generate noticeably better segmentation in significant shorter time than the current state-of-art methods. Finally, we demonstrate applications of CORISE, including physically-based simulation, cage generation and model repairing.