Computing curve skeletons from medial surfaces of 3D shapes

Skeletons are powerful shape descriptors with many applications in shape processing, reconstruction and matching. In this paper we show that in 3D, curve skeletons can be extracted from surface skeletons in the same manner as surface skeletons can be computed from 3D object representations. Thus, the curve skeleton is conceptually the result of a recursion applied twice to a given 3D shape. To compute them, we propose an explicit advection of the surface skeleton in the implicitly-computed gradient of its distance-transform field. Through this process, surface skeleton points collapse into the sought curve skeleton. As a side result, we show how to reconstruct accurate and smooth surface skeletons from point-cloud representations thereof. Finally, we compare our method to existing state-of-the-art approaches.