TCATSeg: A Tooth Center-Wise Attention Network for 3D Dental Model Semantic Segmentation
This addresses the need for precise segmentation in digital dentistry applications like orthodontics and dental implants, representing a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackled the problem of accurate semantic segmentation of 3D dental models, which is hindered by complex tooth arrangements and shape similarities, by proposing TCATSeg, a framework that combines local geometric features with global semantic context, resulting in outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.
Accurate semantic segmentation of 3D dental models is essential for digital dentistry applications such as orthodontics and dental implants. However, due to complex tooth arrangements and similarities in shape among adjacent teeth, existing methods struggle with accurate segmentation, because they often focus on local geometry while neglecting global contextual information. To address this, we propose TCATSeg, a novel framework that combines local geometric features with global semantic context. We introduce a set of sparse yet physically meaningful superpoints to capture global semantic relationships and enhance segmentation accuracy. Additionally, we present a new dataset of 400 dental models, including pre-orthodontic samples, to evaluate the generalization of our method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCATSeg outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.