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.

@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="")

© 2003 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from IEEE. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.