Identification of Articulated Components in 3D Digital Objects Using Curve Skeleton

Abstract

A novel combinatorial algorithm for the segmentation of the articulated components of a 3D digital object is presented in the paper. As a preprocessing step, the single voxel thick 3D curve skeleton of the object is extracted by a topological technique. The curve skeleton is segmented by exploiting the concept of antipodal points in 3D orthogonal domain and calculating the isothetic distance of each voxel to a leaf voxel. The isothetic distance of the voxels on the object surface to the voxels on the segmented curve skeleton is used to separate the articulated components of the object into segments. The segmentation of the curve skeleton is based on the object geometry rather than the topology of the skeleton. The effectiveness of the algorithm has been demonstrated by the experimental results on a variety of articulated objects.