Detection of 3-D Simple Points for Topology Preserving Transformations with Application to Thinning

The problems of 3-D digital topology preservation under binary transformations and 3-D object thinning are considered in this correspondence. First, the authors establish the conditions under which transformation of an object voxel to a non-object voxel, or its inverse does not affect the image topology. An efficient algorithm to detect a simple point has been proposed on the basis of those conditions. In this connection, some other interesting properties of 3-D digital geometry are also discussed. Using these properties and the simple point detection algorithm, the authors have proposed an algorithm to generate a surface-skeleton so that the topology of the original image is preserved, the shape of the image is maintained as much as possible, and the results are less affected by noise. >