English

SurfDist: Interpretable Three-Dimensional Instance Segmentation Using Curved Surface Patches

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2025-10-07 v2

Abstract

We present SurfDist, a convolutional neural network architecture for three-dimensional volumetric instance segmentation. SurfDist enables prediction of instances represented as closed surfaces composed of smooth parametric surface patches, specifically bicubic B\'ezier triangles. SurfDist is a modification of the popular model architecture StarDist-3D which breaks StarDist-3D's coupling of instance parameterization dimension and instance voxel resolution, and it produces predictions which may be upsampled to arbitrarily high resolutions without introduction of voxelization artifacts. For datasets with blob-shaped instances, common in biomedical imaging, SurfDist can outperform StarDist-3D with more compact instance parameterizations. We detail SurfDist's technical implementation and show one synthetic and one real-world dataset for which it outperforms StarDist-3D. These results demonstrate that interpretable instance surface models can be learned effectively alongside instance membership.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.08223,
  title  = {SurfDist: Interpretable Three-Dimensional Instance Segmentation Using Curved Surface Patches},
  author = {Jackson Borchardt and Saul Kato},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.08223},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:55:47.961Z