[jpfed]

>people do not evaluate an object like a computer processing pixels, but based on an imagined internal skeleton

Well, maybe not how computers typically process pixels nowadays, but back in the old days of computer vision one technique for simplifying an image was skeletonization : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_skeleton

[eli_gottlieb]

Yeah, now I'm wondering what topological skeletons might have in common with the abstract simplicial complexes generated by running a persistent homology algorithm on a point cloud.