Example based skeletonization using harmonic one-forms

This paper presents a method to extract skeletons using examples. Our method is based on the observation that many deformations in real world applications are isometric or near isometric. By taking advantage of the intrinsic property of harmonic 1-form, i.e., it is determined by the metric and independent of the resolution and embedding, our method can easily find a consistent mapping between the reference and example poses which can be in different resolutions and triangulations. We first construct the skeleton-like Reeb graph of a harmonic function defined on the given poses. Then by examining the changes of mean curvatures, we identify the initial locations of joints. Finally we refine the joint locations by solving a constrained optimization problem. To demonstrate the efficacy of our method, we apply the extracted skeletons to pose space deformation and skeleton transfer.