Volume-Enclosing Surface Extraction

TL;DR

This paper introduces VESTA, a fast and robust method for extracting triangular isosurfaces from 3D data, offering advantages over traditional algorithms like Marching Cubes.

Contribution

VESTA is a novel volume-enclosing surface extraction technique that handles ambiguities and produces multiple results without relying on templates or fixed voxel neighborhoods.

Findings

VESTA outperforms Marching Cubes in robustness and speed.

VESTA can produce up to six different surface results.

VESTA successfully applied to medical and simulation data.

Abstract

In this paper we present a new method, which allows for the construction of triangular isosurfaces from three-dimensional data sets, such as 3D image data and/or numerical simulation data that are based on regularly shaped, cubic lattices. This novel volume-enclosing surface extraction technique, which has been named VESTA, can produce up to six different results due to the nature of the discretized 3D space under consideration. VESTA is neither template-based nor it is necessarily required to operate on 2x2x2 voxel cell neighborhoods only. The surface tiles are determined with a very fast and robust construction technique while potential ambiguities are detected and resolved. Here, we provide an in-depth comparison between VESTA and various versions of the well-known and very popular Marching Cubes algorithm for the very first time. In an application section, we demonstrate the extraction of VESTA isosurfaces for various data sets ranging from computer tomographic scan data to simulation data of relativistic hydrodynamic fireball expansions.