Part-based segmentation by skeleton cut space analysis

Abstract

We present a new method for part-based segmentation of voxel shapes that uses medial surfaces to define a segmenting cut at each medial voxel. The cut has several desirable properties–smoothness, tightness, and orientation with respect to the shape’s local symmetry axis, making it a good segmentation tool. We next analyze the space of all cuts created for a given shape and detect cuts which are good segment borders. Our method is robust to noise, pose invariant, independent on the shape geometry and genus, and is simple to implement. We demonstrate our method on a wide selection of 3D shapes.