Unified part-patch segmentation of mesh shapes using surface skeletons

Curve skeletons are well known for their ability to support part-based segmentation of 3D shapes. In contrast, surface skeletons have been only sparsely used for this task and, to our knowledge, only for voxel representations. We present here a method to use such surface skeletons to segment 3D meshes. For this, we extend a recent surface-skeleton-based method for part-based segmentation of voxel shapes [16] to efficiently handle high-resolution mesh shapes, on the one hand, and to compute part-based, patch-based, and hybrid part-and-patch segmentations, a result we refer to as unified segmentation. Our method can handle high-resolution 3D meshes with low memory and computational costs and produces segmentations that compare favorably with those delivered by other state-of-the-art methods. We demonstrate our method on a wide collection of both natural (articulated) and man-made (faceted) shapes.