Abstract: Tooth wear has become one of the most common types of damage that occurs in the mouth, attracting the attentions of more and more researchers. To solve the problem of visual simulation of tooth wear, the technique of three-dimensional morphing is grafted to the problem. A salient feature point’s extraction algorithm based on Morse theory and mesh saliency is adopted to realize the extraction of important feature points in important regions, which is of good accuracy and anti-noise property. Using the feature points extracted above as constraints and adopting a method based on an implicit function and the well-known mesh smoothing scheme, the consistent meshes are effectively achieved. The intermediate shapes are obtained by linear interpolation. An experiment on the first lower molar demonstrates that the method proposed is of simplicity, robustness and that no shrinkage is observed during the process, proving to be effective for visual simulation of tooth wear.

Key words: Morse theory, Three-dimensional morphing, Tooth wear, Visual simulation