Supertetras: A Superpixel Analog For Tetrahedral Mesh Oversegmentation

Over the past decade, computer vision algorithms have transitioned from relying on the direct, pixel-based representation of images to the use of superpixels, small regions whose boundaries agree with image contours. This intermediate representation improves the tractability of image understanding because it reduces the number of primitives to be taken under consideration from several million to a few hundred. Despite the improvements yielded in the area of image segmentation, the concept of an oversegmentation as an intermediate representation has not been adopted in volumetric mesh processing. We take a first step in this direction, adapting a fast and efficient superpixel algorithm to the tetrahedral mesh case, present results which demonstrate the quality of the output oversegmentation, and illustrate its use in a semantic segmentation application.