Visualization Handbook

2

Accelerated Isosurface Extraction Approaches

YARDEN LIVNAT,     Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute University of Utah

2.1 Introduction

The marching cubes [7, 15] method demonstrated that isosurface extraction can be reduced, using a divide-and-conquer approach to solving a local triangulation problem. In addition, the marching cubes method proposed a simple and efficient local triangulation using a lookup table. However, the marching cubes did not address the divide portion of the approach, i.e., how to efficiently search a large dataset for these small local triangulations. In fact, the marching cubes method checks each and every cell of the dataset.

In this chapter, we introduce the three main approaches to accelerate isosurface ...