Multi-Dimensional Medial Geometry: Formulation, Computation, and Applications

Medial axis is a classical shape descriptor. It is a piece of geometry that lies in the middle of the original shape. Compared to the original shape representation, the medial axis is always one dimension lower and it carries many intrinsic shape properties explicitly. Therefore, it is widely used in a large amount of applications in various fields. However, medial axis is unstable to the boundary noise, often referred to as its instability. A small amount of change on the object boundary can cause a dramatic change in the medial axis. To tackle this problem, a significance measure is often associated with the medial axis, so that medial points with small significance are removed and only the stable part remains. In addition to this problem, many applications prefer even lower dimensional medial forms, e.g., shape centers of 2D shapes, and medial curves of 3D shapes. Unfortunately, good significance measures and good definitions of lower dimensional medial forms are still lacking. In this dissertation, we extended Blum\u27s grassfire burning to the medial axis in both 2D and 3D to define a significance measure as a distance function on the medial axis. We show that this distance function is well behaved and it has nice properties. In 2D, we also define a shape center based on this distance function. We then devise an iterative algorithm to compute the distance function and the shape center. We demonstrate usefulness of this distance function and shape center in various applications. Finally we point out the direction for future research based on this dissertation

Medial Axis Approximation and Regularization

Medial axis is a classical shape descriptor. Among many good properties, medial axis is thin, centered in the shape, and topology preserving. Therefore, it is constantly sought after by researchers and practitioners in their respective domains. However, two barriers remain that hinder wide adoption of medial axis. First, exact computation of medial axis is very difficult. Hence, in practice medial axis is approximated discretely. Though abundant approximation methods exist, they are either limited in scalability, insufficient in theoretical soundness, or susceptible to numerical issues. Second, medial axis is easily disturbed by small noises on its defining shape. A majority of current works define a significance measure to prune noises on medial axis. Among them, local measures are widely available due to their efficiency, but can be either too aggressive or conservative. While global measures outperform local ones in differentiating noises from features, they are rarely well-defined or efficient to compute. In this dissertation, we attempt to address these issues with sound, robust and efficient solutions. In Chapter 2, we propose a novel medial axis approximation called voxel core. We show voxel core is topologically and geometrically convergent to the true medial axis. We then describe a straightforward implementation as a result of our simple definition. In a variety of experiments, our method is shown to be efficient and robust in delivering topological promises on a wide range of shapes. In Chapter 3, we present Erosion Thickness (ET) to regularize instability. ET is the first global measure in 3D that is well-defined and efficient to compute. To demonstrate its usefulness, we utilize ET to generate a family of shape revealing and topology preserving skeletons. Finally, we point out future directions, and potential applications of our works in real world problems

Geodesic grassfire for computing mixed-dimensional skeletons

Skeleton descriptors are commonly used to represent, understand and process shapes. While existing methods produce skeletons at a fixed dimension, such as surface or curve skeletons for a 3D object, often times objects are better described using skeleton geometry at a mixture of dimensions. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for computing mixed-dimensional skeletons. Our method is guided by a continuous analogue that extends the classical grassfire erosion. This analogue allows us to identify medial geometry at multiple dimensions, and to formulate a measure that captures how well an object part is described by medial geometry at a particular dimension. Guided by this analogue, we devise a discrete algorithm that computes a topology-preserving skeleton by iterative thinning. The algorithm is simple to implement, and produces robust skeletons that naturally capture shape components. Under Revie

Geometric Shape Features Extraction Using a Steady State Partial Differential Equation System

A unified method for extracting geometric shape features from binary image data using a steady state partial differential equation (PDE) system as a boundary value problem is presented in this paper. The PDE and functions are formulated to extract the thickness, orientation, and skeleton simultaneously. The main advantages of the proposed method is that the orientation is defined without derivatives and thickness computation is not imposed a topological constraint on the target shape. A one-dimensional analytical solution is provided to validate the proposed method. In addition, two-dimensional numerical examples are presented to confirm the usefulness of the proposed method.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figure