Skeletonization and Distance Transforms of 3D Volumes Using Graphics Hardware

We propose a fast method for computing distance transforms and skeletons of 3D objects using programmable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) We use an efficient method, called distance splatting, to compute the distance transform, a one-point feature transform, and 3D skeletons We efficiently implement 3D splatting on GPUs using 2D textures and a hierarchical bi-level acceleration scheme We show how to choose near-optimal parameter values to achieve high performance We show 3D skeletonization and object reconstruction examples and compare our performance with similar state-of-the-art methods.