Coverage Axis++: Efficient Inner Point Selection for 3D Shape Skeletonization
This addresses the computational inefficiency and watertightness limitations in current skeletonization methods for 3D modeling and analysis applications, representing an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D shape skeletonization by proposing Coverage Axis++, a heuristic algorithm that efficiently selects skeletal points to approximate the Medial Axis Transform, achieving improved reconstruction accuracy with highly efficient computation across various shape representations.
We introduce Coverage Axis++, a novel and efficient approach to 3D shape skeletonization. The current state-of-the-art approaches for this task often rely on the watertightness of the input or suffer from substantial computational costs, thereby limiting their practicality. To address this challenge, Coverage Axis++ proposes a heuristic algorithm to select skeletal points, offering a high-accuracy approximation of the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) while significantly mitigating computational intensity for various shape representations. We introduce a simple yet effective strategy that considers shape coverage, uniformity, and centrality to derive skeletal points. The selection procedure enforces consistency with the shape structure while favoring the dominant medial balls, which thus introduces a compact underlying shape representation in terms of MAT. As a result, Coverage Axis++ allows for skeletonization for various shape representations (e.g., water-tight meshes, triangle soups, point clouds), specification of the number of skeletal points, few hyperparameters, and highly efficient computation with improved reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments across a wide range of 3D shapes validate the efficiency and effectiveness of Coverage Axis++. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Frank-ZY-Dou/Coverage_Axis.