Patch‐type Segmentation of Voxel Shapes using Simplified Surface Skeletons

We present a new method for decomposing a 3D voxel shape into disjoint segments using the shape's simplified surface‐skeleton. The surface skeleton of a shape consists of 2D manifolds inside its volume. Each skeleton point has a maximally inscribed ball that touches the boundary in at least two contact points. A key observation is that the boundaries of the simplified fore‐ and background skeletons map one‐to‐one to increasingly fuzzy, soft convex, respectively concave, edges of the shape. Using this property, we build a method for segmentation of 3D shapes which has several desirable properties. Our method segments both noisy shapes and shapes with soft edges which vanish over low‐curvature regions. Multiscale segmentations can be obtained by varying the simplification level of the skeleton. We present a voxel‐based implementation of our approach and illustrate it on several realistic examples.