Topology Preserving Simplification of Medial Axes in 3D Models

Abstract

We propose an efficient method for topology-preserving simplification of medial axes of 3D models. Existing methods either cannot preserve the topology during medial axes simplification or have the problem of being geometrically inaccurate or computationally expensive. To tackle these issues, we restrict our topology-checking to the areas around the topological holes to avoid unnecessary checks in other areas. Our algorithm can keep high precision even when the medial axis is simplified to be in very few vertices. Furthermore, we parallelize the medial axes simplification procedure to enhance the performance significantly. Experimental results show that our method can preserve the topology with highly efficient performance, much superior to the existing methods in terms of topology preservation, accuracy and performance.