Computing skeletons in three dimensions

Abstract

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 D 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.

Skeletonization by blocks for large 3D datasets: application to brain microcirculation

“…Many algorithms have been proposed to compute skeletons [1], but all of them implicitly suppose that the image can be processed at once in the computer memory. However, as image resolution keeps increasing, image size keeps growing, which leads to a huge increase of the amount of data to study.…”

Shape Recognition by Combining Contour and Skeleton into a Mid-Level Representation

“…Ling and Jacobs [27] use inner distance to extend shape context to capture articulation. As for skeleton based shape descriptors, the reliability of them is ensured by effective skeletonization [33,12] or skeleton pruning [4,35] methods to a large extent. Among them, the shock graph and its variants [41,34,32] are most popular, which are abstracted from skeletons by designed shape grammar.…”

New techniques for imaging, digitization and analysis of three-dimensional neural morphology on multiple scales

“…1C) using the new Rayburst sampling algorithm described below. We utilize a topology and geometry-preserving skeletonization method for volumetric objects (see Nikolaidis and Pitas, 2001, for review), with a custom modified iterative thinning algorithm (Lee et al, 1994;Borgefors et al, 1999;Tombre et al, 2000;Rodriguez et al, 2003a) to yield robust skeletons in an efficient manner. This is followed by loop removal, pruning to remove small barbs due to surface irregularities, tree smoothing and branch point repositioning (Tombre et al, 2000).…”