We describe a method to reconstruct the surface of a tooth given partial information about its 3D shape (e.g., crown or root information). The shape and deformations of a set of specimens representative of the kind of tooth to reconstruct are learnt offline through statistical analysis, leading to the creation of a point distribution model (PDM). During the reconstruction process, an automatic rigid registration (possibly preceded by a manual one) is realized to align the model with the target, and the PDMa??s parameters are optimized to transform the target by minimizing the sum of squared distances between the two volumes. The method was tested using second upper right premolars and showed its efficiency when reconstructing a tooth given only crown information.
deformable model, 3D shape recovery, elastic registration, point distribution model, partial surface representation, dental cast.
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