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Isosurfacing

Traditional computationally intensive visualization techniques such as isosurfacing do not allow the user real-time interaction for large datasets if implemented with a brute-force approach. A major factor in the efficiency of isocontouring algorithms is the search for cells which contain part of the surface of interest. A major class of accelerated isocontouring algorithms are designed specifically to speed this search. In our approach, we first limit the search to a subset S of cells, with the property that all connected components of any isosurface pass through at least one cell in S. We construct an interval search structure over the cells in S which permits a O(log n + k) search for all intersected cells in S, where n is the size of S and k is the number of intersected cells. Finally, a contour propagation algorithm is applied to compute the entire surface corresponding to each seed cell found in the search phase. In the following sections we will give more detail on each phase.





Dan Schikore
Fri Oct 4 13:30:14 EST 1996