Real-Time GPU Technique for Extracting Mesh Isosurfaces from BCC Volume Datasets

Abstract

We present a real-time GPU(Graphic Processing Unit) marching tetrahedra technique that extracts isosurfaces in the indexed mesh format from BCC(Body Centered Cubic) volume datasets. Compared to classical marching tetrahedra, our method shows better performance with little memory overhead. Our technique is composed of five stages. In the first stage, which needs to be done only once, we build min/max blocks that is to be used for empty space skipping to boost the performance. Next, we extract active blocks that contain the current isovalue. In the next two stages, we extract the edges and cells that contain the isosurface and then the final triangular mesh is generated in the last stage. When applied 512 3 or higher resolution volume dataset, our technique shows up to 5 times speed improvement compared to the classical marching tetrahedra algorithm.

Volume reconstruction based on the six-direction cubic box-spline

“…box spline algorithm code M c400 [56,32] [56] M c010 [34] [34] M c101 [33] [33] M f100 [40,29] [29] M b200 [4,24] [24] M b110 [30,36,31] [35] M b040 [10] an approximation, say a triangulation of a bivariate box spline graph. An alternative approximate evaluation is based on Fast Fourier transform [45].…”