Spectral-based mesh segmentation

In design and manufacturing, mesh segmentation is required for FACE construction in boundary representation (B-Rep), which in turn is central for feature-based design, machining, parametric CAD and reverse engineering, among others. Although mesh segmentation is dictated by geometry and topology, this article focuses on the topological aspect (graph spectrum), as we consider that this tool has not been fully exploited. We pre-process the mesh to obtain a edge-length homogeneous triangle set and its Graph Laplacian is calculated. We then produce a monotonically increasing permutation of the Fiedler vector (2nd eigenvector of Graph Laplacian) for encoding the connectivity among part feature sub-meshes. Within the mutated vector, discontinuities larger than a threshold (interactively set by a human) determine the partition of the original mesh. We present tests of our method on large complex meshes, which show results which mostly adjust to B-Rep FACE partition. The achieved segmentations properly locate most manufacturing features, although it requires human interaction to avoid over segmentation. Future work includes an iterative application of this algorithm to progressively sever features of the mesh left from previous sub-mesh removals.