Topology preserving parallel 3D thinning algorithms

Abstract

A widely used technique to obtain skeletons of binary objects is thinning, which is an iterative layer-by-layer erosion in a topology preserving way. Thinning in 3D is capable of extracting various skeleton-like shape descriptors (i.e., centerlines, medial surfaces, and topological kernels). This chapter describes a family of new parallel 3D thinning algorithms for (26,6) binary pictures. The reported algorithms are derived from some sufficient conditions for topology preserving parallel reduction operations, hence their topological correctness is guaranteed.