Hierarchical Iso-Surface Extraction

The extraction and display of iso-surfaces is a standard method for the visualization of volume data sets. In this paper we present a novel approach that utilizes a hierarchy on both the input and the output data. For the generation of a coarse base mesh, we construct a hierarchy of volumes and extract an iso-surface from the coarsest resolution with a standard Marching Cubes algorithm. We additionally apply a simple mesh decimation algorithm to improve the shape of the triangles. We iteratively fit this mesh to the iso-surface at the finer volume levels. To be able to reconstruct fine detail of the iso-surface we thereby adaptively subdivide the mesh. To evenly distribute the vertices of the triangle mesh over the iso-surface and generate a triangle mesh with evenly shaped triangles, we have integrated a mesh smoothing algorithm into the fitting process. The advantage of this approach is that it generates a mesh with subdivision connectivity which can be utilized by several multireso...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: JCISE
• Authors: Ulf Labsik, Kai Hormann, Martin Meister, Günther Greiner
• Keywords: JCISE 2002, Mesh, Mesh Decimation Algorithm, Triangles