“Curve skeleton extraction from incomplete point cloud” by Tagliasacchi, Zhang and Cohen-Or

We present an algorithm for curve skeleton extraction from imperfect point clouds where large portions of the data may be missing. Our construction is primarily based on a novel notion of generalized rotational symmetry axis (ROSA) of an oriented point set. Specifically, given a subset S of oriented points, we introduce a variational definition for an oriented point that is most rotationally symmetric with respect to S. Our formulation effectively utilizes normal information to compensate for the missing data and leads to robust curve skeleton computation over regions of a shape that are generally cylindrical. We present an iterative algorithm via planar cuts to compute the ROSA of a point cloud. This is complemented by special handling of non-cylindrical joint regions to obtain a centered, topologically clean, and complete 1D skeleton. We demonstrate that quality curve skeletons can be extracted from a variety of shapes captured by incomplete point clouds. Finally, we show how our algorithm assists in shape completion under these challenges by developing a skeleton-driven point cloud completion scheme.

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