Abstract: To cope with the small sample size problem in the construction of Statistical Deformable Models (SDM), this paper proposes two novel measures that quantify the similarity of the variability characteristics among deforming 3D meshes. These measures are used as the basis of our proposed technique for partitioning a 3D mesh for the construction of piecewise SDM in a divide-and-conquer strategy. Specifically, the surface variability information is extracted by performing a global principal component analysis on the set of sample meshes. An iterative face clustering algorithm is developed for segmenting a mesh that favors grouping triangular faces having similar variability characteristics into a same mesh component. We apply the proposed mesh segmentation algorithm to the construction of piecewise SDM and evaluate the representational ability of the resulting piecewise SDM through the reconstruction of unseen meshes. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of the representational ability of the resulting piecewise SDM as evaluated by the reconstruction accuracy.