Abstract
This paper presents a surface segmentation method which uses a simulated inflating balloon model to segment surface structure from volumetric data using a triangular mesh. The model employs simulated surface tension and an inflationary force to grow from within an object and find its boundary. Mechanisms are described which allow both evenly spaced and minimal polygonal count surfaces to be generated. The work is based on inflating balloon models by Terzopolous[8]. Simplifications are made to the model, and an approach proposed which provides a technique robust to noise regardless of the feature detection scheme used. The proposed technique uses no explicit attraction to data features, and as such is less dependent on the initialisation of the model and parameters. The model grows under its own forces, and is never anchored to boundaries, but instead constrained to remain inside the desired object. Results are presented which demonstrate the technique’s ability and speed at the segmentation of a complex, concave object with narrow features.