title: Surface and curve skeletonization of large 3D models on the GPU.
abstract: We present a GPU-based framework for extracting surface and curve skeletons of 3D shapes represented as large polygonal meshes. We use an efficient parallel search strategy to compute point-cloud skeletons and their distance and feature transforms (FTs) with user-defined precision. We regularize skeletons by a new GPU-based geodesic tracing technique which is orders of magnitude faster and more accurate than comparable techniques. We reconstruct the input surface from skeleton clouds using a fast and accurate image-based method. We also show how to reconstruct the skeletal manifold structure as a polygon mesh and the curve skeleton as a polyline. Compared to recent skeletonization methods, our approach offers two orders of magnitude speed-up, high-precision, and low-memory footprints. We demonstrate our framework on several complex 3D models.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. A.C.Jalba@tue.nl
authors.forename: Andrei C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Jalba
authors.forename: Jacek
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kustra
authors.forename: Alexandru C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Telea
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003196:Computer Graphics; D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D012863:Skeleton