The skeleton of a shape in 2d or object in 3d, is a simplified representation of that shape or object. It has been the focus of research in many different fields and has found a variety of application areas, in computer graphics, machine vision, medical image processing, robotic navigation, document pro cessing and so on. The most common skeleton is the medial axis, originally defined by Blum and has been the standard for many years. However, it has certain inherent disadvantages such as being

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... ery sensitive to boundary and volumetric noise and also not invariant under affine transformations. Recently, Betelu et al. have proposed the theory and algorithm for creating the 3d affine invariant skeleton by means of 3d affine erosion. In this project, we have studied the proposed algorithm and introduced further improvements in order to build the software for affine erosion of 3d objects. We have used this software in a number of 3d primitives but more importantly in 3d models of the hu man body, and compared the results with common 3d skeletonisation methods. We examined whether this skeleton fulfils the requirements for noise resistance and affine invariance, and went on to discuss some possible application areas for this type of skeleton. We identified the limitations of this algorithm and proposed some ideas on how it can be further improved in the future. 2