In this paper, we describe a technique to animate volumes using a volumetric skeleton. The skeleton is computed from the actual volume, based on a reversible thinning procedure using the distance transform. Polygons are never computed, and the entire process remains in the volume domain. The skeletal points are connected and arranged in a "skeleton-tree", which can be used for articulation in an animation program. The full volume object is regrown from the transformed skeletal points. Since the

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... skeleton is an intuitive mechanism for animation, the animator deforms the skeleton and causes corresponding deformations in the volume object. The volumetric skeleton can also be used for volume morphing, automatic path navigation, volume smoothing and compression/decimation. and functionally intuitive. Section 2 reviews previous work related to volume animation. In section 3 we describe our algorithm for skeleton extraction and, in section 4, show how it can be used to construct a skeleton tree for animation. Section 5 describes the reconstruction technique for recovering the complete deformed object from the deformed skeleton. This paper focuses on reconstruction binary objects; however we discuss extensions for general reconstruction in section 7. Results are presented in section 6.