A one-step crust and skeleton extraction algorithm

We wish to extract the topology from scanned maps. In previous work [GNY] this was done by extracting a skeleton from the Voronoi diagram, but this required vertex labelling and was only useable for polygon maps. We wished to take the crust algorithm of Amenta et al. [ABE] and modify it to extract the skeleton from unlabelled vertices. We find that by reducing the algorithm to a local test on the original Voronoi diagram we may extract both a crust and a skeleton simultaneously, using a variant of the Quad-Edge structure of [GS]. We show that this crust has the properties of the original, and that the resulting skeleton has many practical uses. We illustrate the usefulness of the combined diagram with various applications.