Topological skeleton

Within the life sciences skeletons found extensive use to characterize protein folding[6] and plant morphology on various biological scales.

In his seminal paper, Harry Blum[8] of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories at Hanscom Air Force Base, in Bedford, Massachusetts, defined a medial axis for computing a skeleton of a shape, using an intuitive model of fire propagation on a grass field, where the field has the form of the given shape.

[9] The skeleton of a shape A can also be defined as the set of centers of the discs that touch the boundary of A in two or more locations.

[10] This definition assures that the skeleton points are equidistant from the shape boundary and is mathematically equivalent to Blum's medial axis transform.

[3] There is a common mis-statement in the literature that the skeleton consists of points which are "locally maximum" in the distance transform.

A shape and its skeleton, computed with a topology-preserving thinning algorithm.