Skeleton extraction by mesh contraction

eleton is a very useful 1D structure to abstract the geometry and topology of a 3D object. Extraction of curve-skeletons is a fundamental problem in computer graphics, visualization, image processing and computer vision. There many useful applications including virtual colonoscopies, collision detection, computer animation, surface reconstruction and shape matching etc. In the literature [1][2], most previous methods require a volumetric discrete representation of the input model. However, transforming them into volumetric representations may raise discretization error in both geometry and connectivity. In this work [3], we propose a novel technique to extract skeletons directly from the mesh domain without requirement of volumetric discretization. Our approach (Figure 1) consists of three main steps: 1) mesh contraction, 2) connectivity surgery and 3) centeredness refinement. First, we contract a given mesh into a zero-volume skeletal shape by applying an iterative Laplacian smoothing...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Oscar Kin-Chung Au, Chiew-Lan Tai, Hung-Kuo Chu, Daniel Cohen-Or, Tong-Yee Lee
• Keywords: Connectivity Surgery, Mesh, TOG 2008, Useful 1D Structure