Speeding Up the 3D Surface Generator VESTA

TL;DR

This paper enhances the VESTA algorithm for 3D surface extraction, focusing on significantly increasing its speed when applied to 2x2x2 voxel neighborhoods, while maintaining its accuracy and topological correctness.

Contribution

It introduces a speed-optimized version of VESTA for efficient 3D surface extraction from voxel data, ensuring non-degenerate, hole-free surfaces with correct interior/exterior information.

Findings

Speed-up achieved for 2x2x2 voxel neighborhoods

Maintains non-degenerate, hole-free surface generation

Ensures correct interior/exterior information propagation

Abstract

The very recent volume-enclosing surface extraction algorithm, VESTA, is revisited. VESTA is used to determine implicit surfaces that are potentially contained in 3D data sets, such as 3D image data and/or 3D simulation data. VESTA surfaces are non-degenerate, i.e., they always enclose a volume that is larger than zero and they never self-intersect, prior to a further processing, e.g., towards isosurfaces. In addition to its ability to deal with local cell ambiguities consistently - and thereby avoiding the accidental generation of holes in the final surfaces - the information of the interior and/or exterior of enclosed 3D volumes is propagated correctly to each of the final surface tiles. Particular emphasis is put here on the speed up of the original formulation of VESTA, while applying the algorithm to 2x2x2 voxel neighborhoods.