Principal Component Analysis-based Mesh Decomposition

We propose an automatic mesh decomposition technique based on principal component analysis (PCA) and Boolean operations. First, we calculate the normalized protrusion degree of each dual vertex on a smoothed 3-D mesh. The protrusion degree of a vertex and the vertex's 3-D coordinates form a 4-D feature vector, which we use to represent the polygon mesh. Then, we apply PCA to the set of 4-D feature vectors. The projected data along the first principal axis reveals the salient structures of the 3-D object. Therefore, by using the first component axis as the search basis, we can identify all the salient parts of an arbitrary 3-D object.