Geometric LiveWire and Geometric LiveLane for 3D Meshes

Similarly to the edges defined in a 2D image, we can define the geometric features representing the boundary of the distinctive parts appearing on 3D meshes. The geometric features have been used as basic primitives in several applications such as mesh simplification, mesh deformation, and mesh editing. In this paper, we propose geometric livewire and geometric livelane for extracting geometric features in a 3D mesh, which are the extentions of livewire and livelane methods in images. In these methods, approximate curvatures are adopted to represent the geometric features in a 3D mesh and the 3D mesh itself is represented as a weighted directed graph in which cost functions are defined for the weights of edges. Using a well-known shortest path finding algorithm in the weighted directed graph, we extracted geometric features in the 3D mesh among points selected by a user. In this paper, we also visualize the results obtained from applying the techniques to extracting geometric features in the general meshes modeled after human faces, cows, shoes, and single teeth.