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Multiresolution Isosurface Extraction with Adaptive Skeleton Climbing
Author(s) -
Poston Tim,
Wong TienTsin,
Heng PhengAnn
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8659.00261
Subject(s) - isosurface , marching cubes , polygon mesh , computer science , skeleton (computer programming) , algorithm , fast marching method , visualization , artificial intelligence , computer graphics (images) , programming language
An isosurface extraction algorithm which can directly generate multiresolution isosurfaces from volume data is introduced. It generates low resolution isosurfaces, with 4 to 25 times fewer triangles than that generated by marching cubes algorithm, in comparable running times. By climbing from vertices (0‐skeleton) to edges (1‐skeleton) to faces (2‐skeleton), the algorithm constructs boxes which adapt to the geometry of the true isosurface. Unlike previous adaptive marching cubes algorithms, the algorithm does not suffer from the gap‐filling problem. Although the triangles in the meshes may not be optimally reduced, it is much faster than postprocessing triangle reduction algorithms. Hence the coarse meshes it produces can be used as the initial starts for the mesh optimization, if mesh optimality is the main concern.