A 3D Curve Skeletonization Method

An efficient and robust technique for the determination of the 3D curve skeleton of a digital object is presented in this paper. As a preprocessing step, the 3D isothetic inner cover of the digital object is constructed. The voxels adjacent to the surface of the inner cover are represented in a topological space. The object voxels which are interior to the inner cover and satisfy certain conditions along the three coordinate planes are also expressed in another topological space. Homotopy equivalence of the topological spaces is utilized to report the 3D curve skeleton. The resultant skeleton is a single voxel thick, connected, and centered representation of the object that preserves the object topology. Accuracy of shape representation by the skeleton may be varied by using control values according to the requirement of the application. Experimental results on a wide range of objects demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the method.