Enhancing 3D mesh topological skeletons with discrete contour constrictions

Julien Tierny, Jean-Philippe Vandeborre and Mohamed Daoudi

International Journal of Computer Graphics - The Visual Computer - Ed. Springer

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This paper describes a unified and fully automatic algorithm for Reeb graph construction and simplification as well as constriction approximation on triangulated surfaces.
The key idea of the algorithm is that discrete contours- curves carried by the edges of the mesh and approximating the continuous contours of a mapping function - encode both topological and geometrical shape characteristics. Therefore, a new concise shape representation, enhanced topological skeletons, is proposed, enconding contours' topological and geometrical evolution.
Firstly, mesh feature points are computed. Then they are used as geodesic origins for the computation of an invariant mapping function that reveals the shape most significant features. Secondly, for each vertex in the mesh, its discrete contour is computed. As the set of discrete contours recovers the whole surface, each of them can be analyzed, both to detect topological changes and constrictions. Constriction approximation enable Reeb graphs refinement into more visually meaningful skeletons, that we refer as enhanced topological skeletons.
Extensive experiments showed that, without preprocessing stage, proposed algorithms are fast in practice, affine-invariant and robust to a variety of surface degradations (surface noise, mesh sampling and model pose variations). These properties make enhanced topological skeletons interesting shape abstractions for many computer graphics applications.

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Updated on August 29th, 2007.