Computing skeletons in three dimensions

Skeletonization will probably become as valuable a tool for shape analysis in 3D, as it is in 2D. We present a topology preserving 3D skeletonization method which computes both surface and curve skeletons whose voxels are lab elled with the D-6 distance to the original background. The surface skeleto n preserves all shape information, so (close to) complete recovery of the o bject is possible. The curve skeleton preserves the general geometry of the object. No complex computations, large sets of masks, or extra memory are used, which make implementations efficient. Resulting skeletons for geometr ic objects in a number of 2 Mbyte images are shown as examples. (C) 1999 Pa ttern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights re served.