3D skeleton transfer for meshes and clouds

We present a curve-skeleton extraction method in the form of curve-skeleton transfer from the source shape to the target. The shapes we deal with need to be in correspondence. They are discretized as meshes embedded in 3D and are not necessarily watertight. They can even be in arbitrary topology, and furthermore be disconnected point clouds. Our method associates the source skeleton with the source shape and computes the optimal rigid transformations towards the corresponding query shape points. This transformation for each source skeleton point is followed by a post-processing operation. Fixed skeleton connectivity maintained throughout the transfer guarantees that the resulting skeleton is as complex as the source skeleton, e.g., no redundant branches and complicated joint hierarchies. The performance and versatility of our method as well as its advantages over a direct skeleton extraction method are demonstrated.