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Blum's medial axes have great strengths, in principle, in intuitively describing object shape in terms of a quasi-hierarchy of figures. But it is well known that, derived from a boundary, they are damagingly sensitive to detail in that boundary. The development of notions of spatial scale has led to some definitions of multiscale medial axes different from the Blum medial axis that considerably overcame the weakness. Three major multiscale medial axes have been proposed: iteratively pruned trees of Voronoi edges (Ogniewicz, 1993; Székely, 1996; Näf, 1996), shock loci of reaction-diffusion equations (Kimia et al., 1995; Siddiqi and Kimia, 1996), and height ridges of medialness (cores) (Fritsch et al., 1994; Morse et al., 1993; Pizer et al., 1998). These are different from the Blum medial axis, and each has different mathematical properties of generic branching and ending properties, singular transitions, and geometry of implied boundary, and they have different strengths and weaknesses for computing object descriptions from images or from object boundaries. These mathematical properties and computational abilities are laid out and compared and contrasted in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]