Hierarchical skeletons and shape components are important shape features, and they are useful for shape description and shape understanding. Techniques to extract shape components and hierarchical skeletons from volume data are analyzed in this paper based on multiple distance transformations. The application of volume decomposition for the extraction of hierarchical skeletons is emphasized and specified here. This work includes an establishment of the hierarchical structure of the object volume, a decomposition of the volume into simple sub-volumes, an extraction of compact skeleton segments corresponding to each independent sub-volume, and a connection of these skeleton segments into a hierarchical structure reflecting the organization the initial data.