title: Topology, accuracy, and quality of isosurface meshes using dynamic particles.
abstract: This paper describes a method for constructing isosurface triangulations of sampled, volumetric, three-dimensional scalar fields. The resulting meshes consist of triangles that are of consistently high quality, making them well suited for accurate interpolation of scalar and vector-valued quantities, as required for numerous applications in visualization and numerical simulation. The proposed method does not rely on a local construction or adjustment of triangles as is done, for instance, in advancing wavefront or adaptive refinement methods. Instead, a system of dynamic particles optimally samples an implicit function such that the particles' relative positions can produce a topologically correct Delaunay triangulation. Thus, the proposed method relies on a global placement of triangle vertices. The main contributions of the paper are the integration of dynamic particles systems with surface sampling theory and PDE-based methods for controlling the local variability of particle densities, as well as detailing a practical method that accommodates Delaunay sampling requirements to generate sparse sets of points for the production of high-quality tessellations.
authors.affiliation: Scientific Computing and Imaging Instiutte at the University of Utah. miriah@sci.utah.edu
authors.forename: Miriah
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Meyer
authors.forename: Robert M
authors.initials: RM
authors.lastname: Kirby
authors.forename: Ross
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Whitaker