Abstract
In this study, new medial surface calculation methods using Voronoi diagrams are investigated for the point samples extracted on closed surface models. The medial surface is defined by the closure of all points having more than one closest point on the shape boundary. It is a one of essential geometric information in 3D and can be used in many areas such as 3D shape analysis, dimension reduction, freeform shape deformation, image processing, computer vision, FEM analysis, etc. In industrial parts, the idealized solid parts and shell shapes including sharp edges and vertices are frequently used. Other medial surface extraction methods using Voronoi diagram have inherent separation and branch problems, so that they are not appropriate to the sharp edged objects and have difficulties to be applied to industrial parts. In addition, the branched surfaces on sharp edges in shell shapes should be eliminated to obtain representative medial shapes. In order to avoid separation and branch problems, the new approach by analyzing the shapes and specially sampling on surfaces has been developed.