Technical Report No. 42, December 1991 - Abstract

Heinrich Müller, Michael Stark:
Adaptive Generation of Surfaces in Volume Data

The generation of polygonal approximations of iso-surfaces or separating surfaces in volume data is a major method in scientific visualization. A widespread approach for this task is the so-called marching cubes algorithm. The marching cubes algorithm, however, has the disadvantage that the number of polygonal chains generated is considerable. The splitting box algorithm presented in this paper reduces the number of polygonal chains by adapting their size to the shape of the surface. The resulting polygonal chains offer a wide spectrum for representing the separating surface. The exact representation is achieved by a new type of generic patches calculated from the polygonal chains. Approximations of different quality may be obtained by combining the algorithm generating the patches with simple triangulations.