STEVE - Space-Time-Enclosing Volume Extraction

TL;DR

STEVE is a new algorithm for extracting 4D hypersurfaces from data sets like time-varying 3D images, ensuring complete enclosure and efficient computation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for generating rift-free, enclosed hypersurfaces in 4D data with reduced computational resources.

Findings

Guarantees enclosed hypersurfaces without rifts

Propagates interior/exterior information to all tetrahedra

Uses less computational resources than existing methods

Abstract

The novel STEVE (i.e., Space-Time-Enclosing Volume Extraction) algorithm is described here for the very first time. It generates iso-valued hypersurfaces that may be implicitly contained in four-dimensional (4D) data sets, such as temporal sequences of three-dimensional images from time-varying computed tomography. Any final hypersurface that will be generated by STEVE is guaranteed to be free from accidental rifts, i.e., it always fully encloses a region in the 4D space under consideration. Furthermore, the information of the interior/exterior of the enclosed regions is propagated to each one of the tetrahedrons, which are embedded into 4D and which in their union represent the final, iso-valued hypersurface(s). STEVE is usually executed in a purely data-driven mode, and it uses lesser computational resources than other techniques that also generate simplex-based manifolds of codimension 1.