Curvature Analysis and Visualization of Dental Mesh Models

Abstract

In order to extract the morphology characteristic of teeth surface, a curvature estimation and visualization method for dental mesh models is investigated in this paper. By using a local cubic surface fitting method the model discrete curvatures are approximated and then improved through histogram equalization algorithm in order to get better views of curvature. The experiment results also demonstrate that the method performs good calculation and visualization performance, which make the model concave and convex characteristics appear more clearly and thus lay a good foundation for subsequent teeth feature extraction.