Slicing-guided Skeleton Extraction Method for 3D Point Clouds of Human Body

In the paper, a slicing-guided method is introduced to extract the curve skeleton from the point cloud body model. Firstly, the dominant eigenvector of body model as slicing direction is chosen adaptively, and the input body model is sliced accordingly. each slice is projected and classified into different regions, and the centroid of each region can be considered as initial skeleton point. Then, those skeleton points are removed outside models, and initial skeleton lines are generated by connecting points based on different region of body model. Finally, the two-step post-processing approach is proposed to improve the initial skeleton results for accurate topological analysis. With the branch point merging strategy, the initial skeleton of the model is optimized. Furthermore, the skeleton lines by interpolation optimization are refined and smoothed. Compared with similar skeleton extraction algorithms, the method proposed in the paper has relatively strong robustness and effectiveness, and can be applied to human body model in point cloud data.