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.
@ARTICLE(http://bigwww.epfl.ch/publications/thevenaz0302.html, 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", note="")