Discrete shading of three-dimensional objects from medial axis transform

In this paper, we present a discrete shading technique using medial axis tr ansform (MAT) of 3D binary image data based on digital generalized octagona l distances. Our method is computationally attractive as it does not requir e the explicit computation of surface normals. We have compared our results with images rendered from voxel and octree representations while using ana lytical surface rendered images as bench marks. The quality of rendering by our method is certainly superior to those obtained from voxel and octree r epresentations. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.