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Voxel cores: efficient, robust, and provably good approximation of 3D medial axes

Published: 30 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm for computing the medial axes of 3D shapes. We make the observation that the medial axis of a voxel shape can be simply yet faithfully approximated by the interior Voronoi diagram of the boundary vertices, which we call the voxel core. We further show that voxel cores can approximate the medial axes of any smooth shape with homotopy equivalence and geometric convergence. These insights motivate an algorithm that is simple, efficient, numerically stable, and equipped with theoretical guarantees. Compared with existing voxel-based methods, our method inherits their simplicity but is more scalable and can process significantly larger inputs. Compared with sampling-based methods that offer similar theoretical guarantees, our method produces visually comparable results but more robustly captures the topology of the input shape.

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  1. Voxel cores: efficient, robust, and provably good approximation of 3D medial axes

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 37, Issue 4
    August 2018
    1670 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/3197517
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 30 July 2018
    Published in TOG Volume 37, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. medial axis
    2. shape analysis
    3. voronoi diagrams
    4. voxelization

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    • (2024)MATTopo: Topology-preserving Medial Axis Transform with Restricted Power DiagramACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/368776343:6(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Nov-2024
    • (2024)Coverage Axis++: Efficient Inner Point Selection for 3D Shape SkeletonizationComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1514343:5Online publication date: 31-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Fitting Skeletal Models via Graph-Based Learning2024 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)10.1109/ISBI56570.2024.10635871(1-4)Online publication date: 27-May-2024
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