Practical Medial Axis Filtering for Occlusion-Aware Contours

We propose a filtering system for occlusion-aware contours. Given a point of view, we use the silhouette of a 3D shape from that point of view, its medial axis and a map of the occluded areas. Our filter is able to select the points of the medial axis which are projections of the curve-skeleton of the 3D shape, discarding all the points affected by occlusions. Our algorithm is easy to implement and works in real time. It can be plugged as is into existing methods for curve-skeleton extraction from 2D images; it can be used to robustly rank silhouettes according to how much they are representative of the 3D shape that generated them and can also be used for shape recognition from images or video sequences.