Tooth segmentation is an important aspect of virtual orthodontic systems. In some existing studies using deep learning-based tooth segmentation methods, the feature learning of point coordinate information and normal vector information is not effectively distinguished. This will lead to the feature information of these two methods not producing complementary intermingling. To address this problem, a tooth segmentation method based on multiple geometric feature learning is proposed in this paper. First, the spatial transformation (T-Net) module is used to complete the alignment of dental model mesh features. Second, a multiple geometric feature learning module is designed to encode and enhance the centroid coordinates and normal vectors of each triangular mesh to highlight the differences between geometric features of different meshes. Finally, for local to global fusion features, feature downscaling and channel optimization are accomplished layer by layer using multilayer perceptron (MLP) and efficient channel attention (ECA). The experimental results show that our algorithm achieves better accuracy and efficiency of tooth segmentation and can assist dentists in their treatment work.
Keywords: 3D shape segmentation; deep learning; geometric feature learning; tooth segmentation.