title: Construction of simplified boundary surfaces from serial-sectioned metal micrographs.
abstract: We present a method for extracting boundary surfaces from segmented cross-section image data. We use a constrained Potts model to interpolate an arbitrary number of region boundaries between segmented images. This produces a segmented volume from which we extract a triangulated boundary surface using well-known marching tetrahedra methods. This surface contains staircase-like artifacts and an abundance of unnecessary triangles. We describe an approach that addresses these problems with a voxel-accurate simplification algorithm that reduces surface complexity by an order of magnitude. Our boundary interpolation and simplification methods are novel contributions to the study of surface extraction from segmented cross-sections. We have applied our method to construct polycrystal grain boundary surfaces from micrographs of a sample of the metal tantalum.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization, University of California, Davis, USA. sedillard@ucdavis.edu
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Dillard
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Bingert
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Thoma
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hamann