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This paper describes a method for partitioning 3D surface meshes into useful segments. The proposed method generalizes morphological watersheds, an image segmentation technique, to 3D surfaces. This surface segmentation uses the total curvature of the surface as an indication of region boundaries. The surface is segmented into patches, where each patch has a relatively consistent curvature throughout, and is bounded by areas of higher, or drastically different, curvature. This algorithm has applications for a variety of important problems in visualization and geometrical modeling including 3D feature extraction, mesh reduction, texture mapping 3D surfaces, and computer aided design.
Mangan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.