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Finding a minimum medial axis of a discrete shape is NP-hard. (English) Zbl 1160.68040

Summary: The medial axis is a classical representation of digital objects widely used in many applications. However, such a set of balls may not be optimal: subsets of the medial axis may exist without changing the reversivility of the input shape representation. In this article, we first prove that finding a minimum medial axis is an NP-hard problem for the Euclidean distance. Then, we compare two algorithms which compute an approximation of the minimum medial axis, one of them providing bounded approximation results.

MSC:

68U05 Computer graphics; computational geometry (digital and algorithmic aspects)
68Q17 Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.)
68W25 Approximation algorithms
Full Text: DOI

References:

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