Fast and precise kinematic skeleton extraction of 3d dynamic meshes

Shape skeleton extraction is a fundamental pre-processing task in shape-based pattern recognition. This paper presents a new algorithm for fast and precise extraction of kinematic skeletons of 3D dynamic surface meshes. Unlike previous approaches, surface motions are characterized by the mesh edge-length deviation in-duced by its transformation through time. Then a static skeleton extraction algorithm based on Reeb graphs ex-ploits this latter information to extract the kinematic skeleton. This hybrid static and dynamic shape analysis enables the precise detection of objects ’ articulations as well as shape topological transitions corresponding to possibly-articulated immobile objects ’ features. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is faster than previous techniques and still achieves bet-ter accuracy. 1