Discrete medial axis transform and applications for 3D printing

3D printing is becoming a more commonly used manufacturing process, both for industrial and consumer use, with ever increasing capabilities and areas of application. These opportunities also introduce higher expectations on the quality of the resulting prints, generally in terms of the resulting shape and appearance of the object, but also rigidness and structural integrity. Detecting characteristics in a model that are a source of errors opens up possible approaches to mitigate or eliminate these errors before printing it. One such characteristic are thin structures that can lead to missing or deformed shapes, changes in the appearance of full color prints or fragile structures that break during post-processing steps. The aim of this work is to detect thin structures using the discrete medial axis, representing the centers of a shape. In order to compute the discrete medial axis a discrete medial axis transform based on image processing techniques is implemented in the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver. The result for different models are assessed and possible correlations of the medial axis and thin structures evaluated. Possible applications of the medial axis or filtered medial axis are proposed and discussed.