Qualitative Comparison of Contraction-Based Curve Skeletonization Methods

In recent years, many new methods have been proposed for extracting curve skeletons of 3D shapes, using a mesh-contraction principle. However, it is still unclear how these methods perform with respect to each other, and with respect to earlier voxel-based skeletonization methods, from the viewpoint of certain quality criteria known from the literature. In this study, we compare six recent contraction-based curve-skeletonization methods that use a mesh representation against six accepted quality criteria, on a set of complex 3D shapes. Our results reveal previously unknown limitations of the compared methods, and link these limitations to algorithmic aspects of the studied methods.