Repairing 3D binary images using the FCC grid

A 3D image I is well-composed if it does not contain critical edges or vertices (where the boundary of I is non-manifold). The process of transforming an image into a well composed one is called repairing. We propose to repair 3D images by associating the face-centered cubic grid (FCC grid) with the cubic grid. We show that the polyhedral complex in the FCC grid, obtained by our repairing algorithm, is well composed and homotopy equivalent to the complex naturally associated with the given image I with edge-adjacency (18-adjacency). We illustrate an application on two tasks related to the repaired image: boundary reconstruction and computation of its Euler characteristic.