Fig. 1. Multimaterial mesh generation algorithm.

a, Description of the successive steps of the Delaunay-watershed algorithm in 2D and 3D. From left to right: microscopy image (artificial here), segmentation mask, EDT map, seeding from extrema of the EDT and Delaunay tessellation, dual Voronoi diagram after the graph was segmented with a watershed cut algorithm⁵⁰ and multimaterial nonmanifold mesh (polygonal in 2D or triangle mesh in 3D). DT, distance transform. b, The geometric precision of our mesh generation algorithm is benchmarked on foam-like simulations (n = 54), which are transformed into artificial images to reconstruct surface meshes. Our pipeline reconstructs cell geometry with better precision than state-of-the-art mesh generation methods, such as CGAL⁴⁶, as shown by the comparison of the error (mean ± s.d.) in the reconstructed angles as a function of the original angle.