  In this paper, a novel model of 3D elastic mesh is presented for image
segmentation. The model is inspired by stress and strain in physical elastic
objects, while the repulsive force and elastic force in the model are defined
slightly different from the physical force to suit the segmentation problem
well. The self-balancing mechanism in the model guarantees the stability of the
method in segmentation. The shape of the elastic mesh at balance state is used
for region segmentation, in which the sign distribution of the points'z
coordinate values is taken as the basis for segmentation. The effectiveness of
the proposed method is proved by analysis and experimental results for both
test images and real world images.
