Simplification of 3D skeletons using distance information

We present a method to simplify the structure of the surface skeleton of a 3D object, such that loss of information can be kept under control. Our approach is to prune surface border jaggedness by removing peripheral curves. The surface border is detected and all curves belonging to it are identified. Then, distance information is used to distinguish the short curves, whose voxels are possibly deleted, provided that the topology is not changed. Our method is simple, fast, and can be applied also to two-voxel thick surface skeletons. It prunes only curves which correspond to minor features of the object, without shortening the remaining more significant curves. The structure of the surface skeleton becomes significantly simplified. The simplified set can be used directly for shape representation, or as input to curve skeleton computation. If we extract the curve skeleton from the simplified set, its structure is more manageable than if the curve skeleton is obtained from the non-simplified set.

[1]  Ingela Nyström,et al.  Connected Components in 3D Neighbourhoods , 1997 .

[2]  Gabriella Sanniti di Baja,et al.  Computing skeletons in three dimensions , 1999, Pattern Recognit..

[3]  Nicholas Ayache,et al.  Topological segmentation of discrete surfaces , 1991, Proceedings. 1991 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

[4]  Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri,et al.  Detection of 3-D Simple Points for Topology Preserving Transformations with Application to Thinning , 1994, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[5]  Alfred M. Bruckstein,et al.  Pruning Medial Axes , 1998, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[6]  T. Saito,et al.  A sequential thinning algorithm for three dimensional digital pictures using the Euclidean distance transformation , 1995 .

[7]  Dominique Attali,et al.  Computing and Simplifying 2D and 3D Continuous Skeletons , 1997, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[8]  Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri,et al.  3D Digital Topology under Binary Transformation with Applications , 1996, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..

[9]  Gabriella Sanniti di Baja,et al.  Surface Skeletons Detected on the D6 Distance Transform , 2000, SSPR/SPR.

[10]  Gilles Bertrand,et al.  Three-dimensional thinning algorithm using subfields , 1995, Other Conferences.

[11]  Stina Svensson,et al.  Fully Reversible Skeletonization for Volume Images Based on Anchor-Points from the D26 Distance Transform , 1999 .

[12]  Gunilla Borgefors,et al.  On Digital Distance Transforms in Three Dimensions , 1996, Comput. Vis. Image Underst..