Precision isosurface rendering of 3D image data.
We address the task of rendering by ray tracing the isosurface of a high-quality continuous model of volumetric discrete and regular data. Based on first principles, we identify the quadratic B-spline as the best model for our purpose. The nonnegativity of this basis function allows us to confine the potential location of the isosurface within a binary shell. We then show how to use the space-embedding property of splines to further shrink this shell to essentially a single voxel width. Not all rays traced through a given shell voxel intersect the isosurface; many may only graze it, especially when the ray-tracing vantage point is close to or within the volume to be rendered. We propose an efficient heuristic to detect those cases. We present experiments to support our claims.
Thévenaz
Philippe
P
Biomedical Imaging Group, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. philippe.thevenaz@epfl.ch
Unser
Michael
M