An Interactive Deforming Framework for Dental Surface Restoration

Abstract

Utilizing dental CAD/CAM system to restore occlusal teeth surface provides us with the possibility of greatly reducing the time to serve patients. Surfaces designed should match the existing jaw articulation and preserve the anatomical characteristics of the generic teeth. In addition, to be suitable for clinical applications, the design process must be highly efficient. In this paper, we describe an interactive framework based on Laplacian coordinate translation-invariant to edit the dental surface freely in a user-specific region. The deformation operation can be accomplished with a little user interaction. First, a region of interest(ROI) is fixed, and a handle (composed by some points in ROI) is chosen, then drag the handle freely, the whole ROI is deformed simultaneously. The error engendered by operating the handle is gradually diffused to the whole dental surface, which enables dental surface to be naturally smooth and continuous. The main computation in this framework is to solve a sparse linear system. By employing the most advanced solvers, our framework performs efficiently to guarantee interactive response time. Experimental results show that the presented algorithm is effective. Several examples are given to demonstrate that the deformation operation changes the shape of the models but preserving the geometrically fine details well.