Burning or Collapsing the Medial Axis is Unstable

Abstract The medial axis of a set consists of the points in the ambient space without a unique closest point in the original set. Since its introduction, the medial axis has been used extensively in many applications as a method of computing a skeleton topologically equivalent to the original set. Unfortunately, one limiting factor in the use of the medial axis of a smooth manifold is that it is not necessarily topologically stable under small perturbations of the manifold. To counter these instabilities, various prunings of the medial axis have been proposed in the computational geometry community. Here, we examine one type of pruning, called burning. Because of the good experimental results it was hoped that the burning method of simplifying the medial axis would be stable. In this work, we show a simple example that dashes such hopes. Based on Bing’s house with two rooms, we demonstrate an isotopy of a shape where the medial axis goes from collapsible to non-collapsible. More precisely, we consider the standard deformation retract from the closed ball to Bing’s house with two rooms, but stop just short of the point where Bing’s house becomes two dimensional. This way we obtain an isotopy from the 3-ball to a thickened version of Bing’s house. Under this isotopy, the medial axis goes from collapsible to non-collapsible. We stress that this isotopy can be made generic, in the sense of singularity theory, as developed by Arnol’d and Thom.