Edge transformations for improving mesh quality of marching cubes

Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Dietrich, Carlos Augusto, Scheidegger, Carlos Eduardo, Schreiner, John, Nedel, Luciana Porcher, Comba, Joao Luiz Dihl, Silva, Cláudio Teixeira
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2009
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)
Repositorio:Repositório Institucional da UFRGS
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:www.lume.ufrgs.br:10183/27620
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10183/27620
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Computação gráfica
3D
Diagnóstico : Imagem
Meshing
Marching cubes
Descripción
Sumario:Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often addressed through postprocessing operations such as smoothing. As we demonstrate in experiments with several data sets, while these improve the mesh, they do not remove all degeneracies and incur an increased and unbounded error between the resulting mesh and the original isosurface. Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates. This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted mesh. In our experiments, our method did not create a single degenerate triangle, unlike any other method we experimented with. Our method incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring at most twice the execution time of the original Marching Cubes algorithm in our experiments. Most importantly, it can be readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations and is orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (particularly, performance enhancements such as out-of-core and acceleration structures).