SOFTooth: Semantics-Enhanced Order-Aware Fusion for Tooth Instance Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Xiaolan, Liu, Wanquan, Li, Pengcheng, Jie, Pengyu, Gao, Chenqiang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866914223745925120
author Li, Xiaolan
Liu, Wanquan
Li, Pengcheng
Jie, Pengyu
Gao, Chenqiang
author_facet Li, Xiaolan
Liu, Wanquan
Li, Pengcheng
Jie, Pengyu
Gao, Chenqiang
contents Three-dimensional (3D) tooth instance segmentation remains challenging due to crowded arches, ambiguous tooth-gingiva boundaries, missing teeth, and rare yet clinically important third molars. Native 3D methods relying on geometric cues often suffer from boundary leakage, center drift, and inconsistent tooth identities, especially for minority classes and complex anatomies. Meanwhile, 2D foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) provide strong boundary-aware semantics, but directly applying them in 3D is impractical in clinical workflows. To address these issues, we propose SOFTooth, a semantics-enhanced, order-aware 2D-3D fusion framework that leverages frozen 2D semantics without explicit 2D mask supervision. First, a point-wise residual gating module injects occlusal-view SAM embeddings into 3D point features to refine tooth-gingiva and inter-tooth boundaries. Second, a center-guided mask refinement regularizes consistency between instance masks and geometric centroids, reducing center drift. Furthermore, an order-aware Hungarian matching strategy integrates anatomical tooth order and center distance into similarity-based assignment, ensuring coherent labeling even under missing or crowded dentitions. On 3DTeethSeg'22, SOFTooth achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and mean IoU, with clear gains on cases involving third molars, demonstrating that rich 2D semantics can be effectively transferred to 3D tooth instance segmentation without 2D fine-tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_23411
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SOFTooth: Semantics-Enhanced Order-Aware Fusion for Tooth Instance Segmentation
Li, Xiaolan
Liu, Wanquan
Li, Pengcheng
Jie, Pengyu
Gao, Chenqiang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Three-dimensional (3D) tooth instance segmentation remains challenging due to crowded arches, ambiguous tooth-gingiva boundaries, missing teeth, and rare yet clinically important third molars. Native 3D methods relying on geometric cues often suffer from boundary leakage, center drift, and inconsistent tooth identities, especially for minority classes and complex anatomies. Meanwhile, 2D foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) provide strong boundary-aware semantics, but directly applying them in 3D is impractical in clinical workflows. To address these issues, we propose SOFTooth, a semantics-enhanced, order-aware 2D-3D fusion framework that leverages frozen 2D semantics without explicit 2D mask supervision. First, a point-wise residual gating module injects occlusal-view SAM embeddings into 3D point features to refine tooth-gingiva and inter-tooth boundaries. Second, a center-guided mask refinement regularizes consistency between instance masks and geometric centroids, reducing center drift. Furthermore, an order-aware Hungarian matching strategy integrates anatomical tooth order and center distance into similarity-based assignment, ensuring coherent labeling even under missing or crowded dentitions. On 3DTeethSeg'22, SOFTooth achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy and mean IoU, with clear gains on cases involving third molars, demonstrating that rich 2D semantics can be effectively transferred to 3D tooth instance segmentation without 2D fine-tuning.
title SOFTooth: Semantics-Enhanced Order-Aware Fusion for Tooth Instance Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23411