Awesome 3D Medial Axis

A compilation on Medial Axis/Skeleton and its applications, comprising academic papers, as well as some valuable open-source projects.

The focus is primarily on three-dimensional graphics, particularly work related to CAD geometric processing.

I will divide these works into two categories: Computation Methods and Applications.

The Computation Methods will be classified by their publication years, while the Applications will be categorized by their application scenarios.

😊 I will update it regularly.

Computation Methods

2025

• Ningna Wang, Rui Xu, Yibo Yin, Zichun Zhong, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang, and Xiaohu Guo. "MATStruct: High-quality Medial Mesh Computation via Structure-aware Variational Optimization".
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2025
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Pengfei Wang, Jiantao Song, Lei Wang, Shiqing Xin, Dong-Ming Yan, Shuangmin Chen, Changhe Tu, Wenping Wang. "Towards Voronoi Diagrams of Surface Patches".
  • TVCG 2025
  • [Paper]
• Mengyuan Ge, Junfeng Yao, Baorong Yang, Ningna Wang, Zhonggui Chen, Xiaohu Guo. "RBF-MAT: Computing Medial Axis Transform from Point Clouds by Optimizing Radial Basis Functions".
  • CAGD 2025
  • [Paper]

2024

• Ningna Wang, Hui Huang, Shibo Song, Bin Wang, Wenping Wang, Xiaohu Guo. "MATTopo: Topology-preserving Medial Axis Transform with Restricted Power Diagram".
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Minghao Guo, Bohan Wang, Wojciech Matusik. "Medial Skeletal Diagram: A Generalized Medial Axis Approach for 3D Shape Representation".
  • TOG 2024
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Dmitry Petrov, Pradyumn Goyal, Vikas Thamizharasan, Vladimir G. Kim, Matheus Gadelha, Melinos Averkiou, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Evangelos Kalogerakis. "GEM3D: Generative Medial Abstractions for 3D Shape Synthesis".
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Qijia Huang, Pierre Kraemer, Sylvain Thery, Dominique Bechmann. "Dynamic Skeletonization Via Variational Medial Axis Sampling".
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2024
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Zimeng Wang, Zhiyang Dou, Rui Xu, Cheng Lin, Yuan Liu, Xiaoxiao Long, Shiqing Xin, Lingjie Liu, Taku Komura, Xiaoming Yuan, Wenping Wang. "Coverage Axis++: Efficient Inner Point Selection for 3D Shape Skeletonization".
  • SGP 2024
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Bingchuan Li, Yuping Ye, Junfeng Yao, Yong Yang, Weixing Xie, Mengyuan Ge. "A detail-preserving method for medial mesh computation in triangular meshes".
  • GM 2024
  • [Paper]

2023

• Jianwei Hu, Ningna Wang, Baorong Yang, Gang Chen, Xiaohu Guo, and Bin Wang. "S3DS: Self-supervised Learning of 3D Skeletons from Single View Images".
  • ACM MM 2023
  • [Paper][Code]
• Mattéo Clémot, Julie Digne. "Neural skeleton: implicit neural representation away from the surface".
  • SMI 2023
  • [Paper][Code]
• Mengyuan Ge, Junfeng Yao, Baorong Yang, Ningna Wang, Zhonggui Chen, Xiaohu Guo. "Point2MM: Learning medial mesh from point clouds".
  • C&G 2023
  • [Paper]

2022

• Ningna Wang, Bin Wang, Wenping Wang, Xiaohu Guo. "Computing Medial Axis Transform with Feature Preservation via Restricted Power Diagram".
  • SIGGRAPH Asia 2022
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Zhiyang Dou, Cheng Lin, Rui Xu, Lei Yang, Shiqing Xin, Taku Komura, Wenping Wang. "Coverage Axis: Inner Point Selection for 3D Shape Skeletonization".
  • EG 2022
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

2021

• Cheng Lin, Changjian Li, Yuan Liu, Nenglun Chen, Yi-King Choi, Wenping Wang. "Point2Skeleton: Learning Skeletal Representations from Point Clouds".
  • CVPR 2021
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

2019

• Hongxing Qin, Jia Han, Ning Li, Hui Huang, Baoquan Chen. "Mass-driven Topology-aware Curve Skeleton Extraction from Incomplete Point Clouds".
  • TVCG 2019
  • [Paper][Project Page]

2018

• Yajie Yan, David Letscher, Tao Ju. "Voxel Cores: Efficient, robust, and provably good approximation of 3D medial axes".
  • SIGGRAPH 2018
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

2016

• Yajie Yan, Kyle Sykes, Erin Chambers, David Letscher, Tao Ju. "Erosion Thickness on Medial Axes of 3D Shapes".
  • SIGGRAPH 2016
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

2015

• Pan Li, Bin Wang, Feng Sun, Xiaohu Guo, Caiming Zhang, Wenping Wang. "Q-MAT: Computing Medial Axis Transform by Quadratic Error Minimization".
  • TOG 2015
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Yang Zhou, Kangxue Yin, Hui Huang, Hao Zhang, Minglun Gong, Daniel Cohen-Or. "Generalized cylinder decomposition".
  • TOG 2015
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

2012

• Jaehwan Ma, Sang Won Bae, Sunghee Choi. "3D medial axis point approximation using nearest neighbors and the normal field".
  • TVC 2012
  • [Paper][Code(by tudelft3d)]
• Andrea Tagliasacchi, Ibraheem Alhashim, Matt Olson, Hao Zhang. "Mean Curvature Skeletons".
  • SGP 2012
  • [Paper][Code][CGAL Document]

2009

• Andrea Tagliasacchi, Hao Zhang, Daniel Cohen-Or. "Curve Skeleton Extraction from Incomplete Point Cloud".
  • SIGGRAPH 2009
  • [Paper][Code]

Applications

Hex-mesh Generation

• Sheng Zhang, Gang Xu, Haiyan Wu, Renshu Gu, Long Qi, Yufei Pang. "Medial hex‑meshing: high‑quality all‑hexahedral mesh generation based on medial mesh".
  • Engineering with Computers 2024
  • [Paper][Code]
• Paul Viville, Pierre Kraemer and Dominique Bechmann. "Meso-Skeleton Guided Hexahedral Mesh Design".
  • CGF 2023
  • [Paper][Code]
• Marco Livesu, Marco Attene, Giuseppe Patané, Michela Spagnuolo. "Explicit cylindrical maps for general tubular shapes".
  • CAD 2017
  • [Paper]
• Marco Livesu, Alessandro Muntoni, Enrico Puppo, Riccardo Scateni. "Skeleton-driven Adaptive Hexahedral Meshing of Tubular Shape".
  • CGF 2016
  • [Paper]
• William Roshan Quadros. "LayTracks3D: A new approach for meshing general solids using medial axis transform".
  • CAD 2016
  • [Paper]

Shape Segmentation

• Ruijie Zou, Maodong Pan, Ye Zheng, Falai Chen, Weihua Tong. "MAT-Parameterization: Volumetric Multi-patch Parameterizations of Complex Domains for Isogeometric Analysis Using MAT-based Decomposition"
  • CMAME 2025
  • [Paper]
• Cheng Lin, Lingjie Liu, Changjian Li, Leif Kobbelt, Bin Wang, Shiqing Xin, Wenping Wang. "SEG-MAT: 3D Shape Segmentation Using Medial Axis Transform".
  • TVCG 2020
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]
• Dennie Reniers, Alexandru Telea. "Part‐type Segmentation of Articulated Voxel‐Shapes using the Junction Rule".
  • CGF 2008
  • [Paper]

Surface Reconstruction

• Nina Amenta, SungheeChoi Ravi, Krishna Kolluri. "The Power Crust".
  • ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling 2001
  • [Paper][Project Page][Code]

Quad Layout

• Francesco Usai, Marco Livesu, Enrico Puppo, Marco Tarini, Riccardo Scateni. "Extraction of the Quad Layout of a Triangle Mesh Guided by its Curve-Skeleton".
  • TOG 2015
  • [Paper][Project Page]

Collision Detection

• Xingxin Li, Shibo Song, Junfeng Yao, Hanyin Zhang, Rongzhou Zhou, Qingqi Hong. "Efficient collision detection using hybrid medial axis transform and BVH for rigid body simulation".
  • GM 2023
  • [Paper]

Object Recognition

• Jianwei Hu, Bin Wang, Lihui Qian, Yiling Pan, Xiaohu Guo, Lingjie Liu, Wenping Wang. "MAT-Net: Medial Axis Transform Network for 3D Object Recognition".
  • IJCAI 2019
  • [Paper][Code]

Point Cloud Sampling

• Cheng Wen, Baosheng Yu, Dacheng Tao. "Learnable Skeleton-Aware 3D Point Cloud Sampling".
  • CVPR 2023
  • [Paper][Code]