GeoT: Geometry-guided Instance-dependent Transition Matrix for Semi-supervised Tooth Point Cloud Segmentation
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Mar 21, 2025
Abstract
Achieving meticulous segmentation of tooth point clouds from intra-oral scans
stands as an indispensable prerequisite for various orthodontic applications.
Given the labor-intensive nature of dental annotation, a significant amount of
data remains unlabeled, driving increasing interest in semi-supervised
approaches. One primary challenge of existing semi-supervised medical
segmentation methods lies in noisy pseudo labels generated for unlabeled data.
To address this challenge, we propose GeoT, the first framework that employs
instance-dependent transition matrix (IDTM) to explicitly model noise in pseudo
labels for semi-supervised dental segmentation. Specifically, to handle the
extensive solution space of IDTM arising from tens of thousands of dental
points, we introduce tooth geometric priors through two key components:
point-level geometric regularization (PLGR) to enhance consistency between
point adjacency relationships in 3D and IDTM spaces, and class-level geometric
smoothing (CLGS) to leverage the fixed spatial distribution of tooth categories
for optimal IDTM estimation. Extensive experiments performed on the public
Teeth3DS dataset and private dataset demonstrate that our method can make full
utilization of unlabeled data to facilitate segmentation, achieving performance
comparable to fully supervised methods with only $20\%$ of the labeled data.
