In this paper the authors present a novel semi-automatic feature line detection technique for meshes. Taking into account the distance and orientation between two vertices on meshes and the curvature information of vertices, they first find an initial feature line which connects some user-specified vertices on meshes; then parameterize the "feature strip" surrounding the feature line onto a planar domain using a vertex flattening technique; and refine the flattened feature strip using the 2D snakes approach to make the feature line smoother and more accurate; lastly they get the feature line by mapping the refined line back to the original meshes. Experimental results showed that their method can extract the feature line rapidly and precisely. As an application, they propose a mesh decomposition method based on the detected feature line.