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 labelled with the D6 distance to the original background. The surface skeleton preserves all shape information, so (close to) complete recovery of the object 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 e$cient. Resulting skeletons for geometric objects in a number of 2 Mbyte images are shown as examples. ( 1999 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.