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Medial Spheres for Shape Representation - CIM - McGill University

Medial Spheres for Shape Representation - CIM - McGill University

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Figure 1–5: Left: Both the interior and the exterior medial axis, cropped to a rectangle.<br />

Right: An illustration of Property 1.1.<br />

surface trans<strong>for</strong>m was proposed in the 1960s by Harry Blum [17, 18] as a shape descrip-<br />

tor that makes explicit perceptually significant shape properties. It has since been studied<br />

extensively in the computer vision community as it allows abstraction sufficient to guide<br />

shape matching, in robotics as it offers a collision avoiding path, in computer graphics to<br />

generate de<strong>for</strong>mations of models, in medical imaging to capture local shape variation, in<br />

geography to simplify the shape of rivers, among some examples. See [106, Ch. 11] <strong>for</strong> a<br />

detailed overview of applications of the medial surface trans<strong>for</strong>m.<br />

For all solids (except those that are disjoint balls) the medial surface trans<strong>for</strong>m con-<br />

sists of an infinite set of medial spheres. The shape representation proposed in this<br />

thesis is a union of a finite set of medial spheres and is thus a discretization of the<br />

medial surface trans<strong>for</strong>m.<br />

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