Medial Representations: Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications

The last half century has seen the development of many biological or physical theories that have explicitly or implicitly involved medial descriptions of objects and other spatial entities in our world. Simultaneously mathematicians have studied the properties of these skeletal descriptions of shape, and, stimulated by the many areas where medial models are useful, computer scientists and engineers have developed numerous algorithms for computing and using these models. We bring this knowledge and experience together into this book in order to make medial technology more widely understood and used.