# When 3D Partial Points Meets SAM: Tooth Point Cloud Segmentation with Sparse Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01691 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01691/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [One Thing One Click: A Self-Training Approach for Weakly Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02246/) (2021)
- [Guided Point Contrastive Learning for Semi-supervised Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08188/) (2021)
- [SIGMA: Semantic-complete Graph Matching for Domain Adaptive Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06398/) (2022)
- [SQN: Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04891/) (2021)
- [Endora: Video Generation Models as Endoscopy Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11050/) (2024)
- [LGS: A Light-weight 4D Gaussian Splatting for Efficient Surgical Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16073/) (2024)
- [EndoSparse: Real-Time Sparse View Synthesis of Endoscopic Scenes using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01029/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Deep Network with Uncertainty-aware Semi-supervised Learning for Vessel Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14732/) (2021)
- [3DTeethSeg'22: 3D Teeth Scan Segmentation and Labeling Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18277/) (2023)
- [All Points Matter: Entropy-Regularized Distribution Alignment for Weakly-supervised 3D Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15832/) (2023)
- [AFSC: Adaptive Fourier Space Compression for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07963/) (2022)
- [GaussianStego: A Generalizable Stenography Pipeline for Generative 3D Gaussians Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01301/) (2024)
- [TSegFormer: 3D Tooth Segmentation in Intraoral Scans with Geometry Guided Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13234/) (2023)
- [GTP-4o: Modality-prompted Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Omni-modal Biomedical Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05540/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LiDAR Remote Sensing Meets Weak Supervision: Concepts, Methods, and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18384/) (2025)
- [ConcealGS: Concealing Invisible Copyright Information in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03605/) (2025)
- [ArchMap: Arch-Flattening and Knowledge-Guided Vision Language Model for Tooth Counting and Structured Dental Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14336/) (2025)
- [Text Condition Embedded Regression Network for Automated Dental Abutment Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22578/) (2025)
- [SOFTooth: Semantics-Enhanced Order-Aware Fusion for Tooth Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23411/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tooth point cloud segmentation is a fundamental task in many orthodontic applications. Current research mainly focuses on fully supervised learning which demands expensive and tedious manual point-wise annotation. Although recent weakly-supervised alternatives are proposed to use weak labels for 3D segmentation and achieve promising results, they tend to fail when the labels are extremely sparse. Inspired by the powerful promptable segmentation capability of the Segment Anything Model (SAM), we propose a framework named SAMTooth that leverages such capacity to complement the extremely sparse supervision. To automatically generate appropriate point prompts for SAM, we propose a novel Confidence-aware Prompt Generation strategy, where coarse category predictions are aggregated with confidence-aware filtering. Furthermore, to fully exploit the structural and shape clues in SAM's outputs for assisting the 3D feature learning, we advance a Mask-guided Representation Learning that re-projects the generated tooth masks of SAM into 3D space and constrains these points of different teeth to possess distinguished representations. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework, we conduct experiments on the public dataset and surprisingly find with only 0.1% annotations (one point per tooth), our method can surpass recent weakly supervised methods by a large margin, and the performance is even comparable to the recent fully-supervised methods, showcasing the significant potential of applying SAM to 3D perception tasks with sparse labels. Code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/SAMTooth.