Boundary surface extraction and rendering for volume datasets

ABSTRACT

Traditional iso-surface techniques focus on the extraction and rendering of contour surfaces. Boundary surfaces, however, are often more interesting and useful to the applications as they are more natural representations of the objects embedded in the dataset. This paper describes an efficient boundary surface extraction and rendering approach for volume datasets. A volume dataset is first filtered using a Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filter to generate a zero-crossing field, from which boundary surface information is extracted. Two types of surfaces can be generated: (1) zero-crossing surface; and (2) iso-surface boundaries. The zero-crossing surface can be extracted directly from the zero-crossing field as an iso-surface with a zero iso-value. Original intensity values will then be attached to the vertices of the polygon mesh for flexible rendering. Iso-surface boundaries are the iso-surfaces from the original volume that best approximate the zero-crossing boundaries. The iso-values of these iso-surface boundaries are obtained through a histogram analysis of the zero-crossing boundaries in a multi-scale space. The new approach provides a more efficient and accurate surface navigation technique for volume data exploration.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.3 Picture/Image Generation

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
iso-surface extraction, multi-scale space, volume visualization, zero-crossing surfaces