From the zones of influence of skeleton branch points to meaningful object parts

A 3D object decomposition method is presented, which is based on the decomposition of the linear skeleton guided by the zones of influence. These are the connected components of voxels obtained by applying the reverse distance transformation to the branch points of the skeleton. Their role is to group sufficiently close branch points and to detect perceptually meaningful skeleton branches that are in a one-to-one relation with the object parts.