EPFL | Biomedical Imaging Group | Isosurface Rendering

Precision Isosurface Rendering of 3-D Image Data

P. Thévenaz, M. Unser

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 764-775, July 2003.

We address the task of rendering by ray tracing the isosurface of a high-quality continuous model of volumetric discrete and regular data. Based on first principles, we identify the quadratic B-spline as the best model for our purpose. The nonnegativity of this basis function allows us to confine the potential location of the isosurface within a binary shell. We then show how to use the space-embedding property of splines to further shrink this shell to essentially a single voxel width. Not all rays traced through a given shell voxel will intersect the isosurface; many may only graze it, especially when the ray-tracing vantage point is close or within the volume to render. We propose here an efficient heuristic to detect those cases. We present experiments to support our claims.

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AUTHOR="Th{\'{e}}venaz, P. and Unser, M.",
TITLE="Precision Isosurface Rendering of \mbox{3-D} Image Data",
JOURNAL="{IEEE} Transactions on Image Processing",
YEAR="2003",
volume="12",
number="7",
pages="764--775",
month="July",
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