Penalized-distance volumetric skeleton algorithm

This paper introduces a refined general definition of a skeleton that is based on a penalized-distance function and cannot create any of the degenerate cases of the earlier CEASAR and TEASAR algorithms. Additionally, we provide an algorithm that finds the skeleton accurately and rapidly. Our solution is fully automatic, which frees the user from having to engage in manual data preprocessing. We present the accurate skeletons computed on a number of test datasets. The algorithm is very efficient as demonstrated by the running times which were all below seven minutes.