Part-Based Mesh Segmentation: A Survey

This paper surveys mesh segmentation techniques and algorithms, with a focus on part-based segmentation, that is, segmentation that divides a mesh (featuring a 3D object) into meaningful parts. Part-based segmentation applies to a single object and also to a family of objects (i.e. co-segmentation). However, we shall not address here chart-based segmentation, though some mesh co-segmentation methods employ such chart-based segmentation in the initial step of their pipeline. Finally, the taxonomy proposed in this paper is new in the sense that one classifies each segmentation algorithm regarding the dimension (i.e. 1D, 2D and 3D) of the representation of object parts. The leading idea behind this survey is to identify the properties and limitations of the state-of-the-art algorithms to shed light on the challenges for future work.