Skeletonization and distance transforms of 3D volumes using graphics hardware

We propose a fast method for computing distance transforms and skeletons of 3D objects using programmable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). We use an efficient method, called distance splatting, to compute the distance transform, a one-point feature transform, and 3D skeletons. We efficiently implement 3D splatting on GPUs using 2D textures and a hierarchical bi-level acceleration scheme. We show how to choose near-optimal parameter values to achieve high performance. We show 3D skeletonization and object reconstruction examples and compare our performance with similar state-of-the-art methods