The Mesh Propagation Algorithm for Isosurface Construction

A new algorithm, Mesh Propagation, is presented for the generation of isosurfaces from three-dimensional discrete data sets. While producing the same surface mesh as that generated by a corrected Marching Cubes algorithm, its characteristic is that it constructs an isosurface using connected strips of dynamically triangulated polygons. This compact data structure speeds up surface construction and reduces surface storage requirements. The surface can also be displayed more quickly, particularly where there is hardware support for rendering triangle strips. With engineering as well as medical imaging applications in mind, the algorithm can be used with both irregular and rectilinear grids of data, the primitive volume elements need not be hexahedral only, and volumes of heterogeneous polyhedral elements are supported without traversal complications. The algorithm propagates through the cells in the grid and uses the same lookup table topologies as Marching Cubes to determine patches of surface-element intersection; additional tables are used for non-hexahedral elements. The surface patches are dynamically coded into triangle strips which are then concatenated and linked to construct the surface. The data structures used for propagating through the volume overcome the topological ambiguities associated with table-based methods of surface construction and no holes are generated in the final mesh.     

一种改进的MC算法

为了对等值面与子等值面进行提取和分组,在MC算法原理的基础上,提出了一种改进的等值面提取与子等值面分组算法。该算法首先将数据场分解为点、棱边、面与体元的拓扑结构;然后在整个数据场范围内求所有棱边与等值面的交点,并在面内连接交点形成面与等值面的交线,交线在体元内连接生成空间多边形;接着通过三角化各个体元内的空间多边形得到由顶点表与三角形表组成的等值面数据;最后根据三角形在顶点处的连接关系,采用种子算法对属于同一子等值面的三角形与顶点进行标记,属于同一子等值面的顶点与三角形将被存放在独立的顶点表与三角形表中。实验结果表明,该算法可以高效地实现等值面提取与子等值面的分组。     

An Interactive Approach to Point Cloud Triangulation

We present an interactive system for the generation of high quality triangle meshes that allows us to handle hybrid geometry (point clouds, polygons,. . .) as input data. In order to be able to robustly process huge data sets, we exploit graphics hardware features like the raster manager and the z-buffer for specific sub-tasks in the overall procedure. By this we significantly accelerate the stitching of mesh patches and obtain an algorithm for sub-sampling the data points in linear time. The target resolution and the triangle alignment in sub-regions of the resulting mesh can be controlled by adjusting the screen resolution and viewing transformation. An intuitive user interface provides a flexible tool for application dependent optimization of the mesh.     

Multiresolution Isosurface Extraction with Adaptive Skeleton Climbing

An isosurface extraction algorithm which can directly generate multiresolution isosurfaces from volume data is introduced. It generates low resolution isosurfaces, with 4 to 25 times fewer triangles than that generated by marching cubes algorithm, in comparable running times. By climbing from vertices (0-skeleton) to edges (1-skeleton) to faces (2-skeleton), the algorithm constructs boxes which adapt to the geometry of the true isosurface. Unlike previous adaptive marching cubes algorithms, the algorithm does not suffer from the gap-filling problem. Although the triangles in the meshes may not be optimally reduced, it is much faster than postprocessing triangle reduction algorithms. Hence the coarse meshes it produces can be used as the initial starts for the mesh optimization, if mesh optimality is the main concern.     

等值面的高质量显示方法

等值面是描述体数据中所含特定器官表面的有效方式，因此对等值面进行快速高质量的显示就显得非常重要。与以往的等值面显示算法不同，本文提出的方法不需要用三角形网格去逼近等值面然后再对三角形网格进行显示，而是直接对原始等值面进行显示，从而避免了三角化过程中的计算损耗和精度损失等问题，保证了等值面轮廓不会出现锯齿状现象，使等值面的显示既快速又准确。     

Mesh Optimization for Polygonized Isosurfaces

In this paper, we propose a method for improvement of isosurface polygonizations. Given an initial polygonization of an isosurface, we introduce a mesh evolution process initialized by the polygonization. The evolving mesh converges quickly to its limit mesh which provides with a high quality approximation of the isosurface even if the isosurface has sharp features, boundary, complex topology. To analyze how close the evolving mesh approaches its destined isosurface, we introduce error estimators measuring the deviations of the mesh vertices from the isosurface and mesh normals from the isosurface normals. A new technique for mesh editing with isosurfaces is also proposed. In particular, it can be used for creating carving effects.     

Displacement-Correlated XFEM for Simulating Brittle Fracture

We present a remeshing-free brittle fracture simulation method under the assumption of quasi-static linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM). To achieve this, we devise two algorithms. First, we develop an approximate volumetric simulation, based on the extended Finite Element Method (XFEM), to initialize and propagate Lagrangian crack-fronts. We model the geometry of fracture explicitly as a surface mesh, which allows us to generate high-resolution crack surfaces that are decoupled from the resolution of the deformation mesh. Our second contribution is a mesh cutting algorithm, which produces fragments of the input mesh using the fracture surface. We do this by directly operating on the half-edge data structures of two surface meshes, which enables us to cut general surface meshes including those of concave polyhedra and meshes with abutting concave polygons. Since we avoid triangulation for cutting, the connectivity of the resulting fragments is identical to the (uncut) input mesh except at edges introduced by the cut. We evaluate our simulation and cutting algorithms and show that they outperform state-of-the-art approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.     

Interactive point-based isosurface exploration and high-quality rendering

We present an efficient point-based isosurface exploration system with high quality rendering. Our system incorporates two point-based isosurface extraction and visualization methods: edge splatting and the edge kernel method. In a volume, two neighboring voxels define an edge. The intersection points between the active edges and the isosurface are used for exact isosurface representation. The point generation is incorporated in the GPU-based hardware-accelerated rendering, thus avoiding any overhead when changing the isovalue in the exploration. We call this method edge splatting. In order to generate high quality isosurface rendering regardless of the volume resolution and the view, we introduce an edge kernel method. The edge kernel upsamples the isosurface by subdividing every active cell of the volume data. Enough sample points are generated to preserve the exact shape of the isosurface defined by the trilinear interpolation of the volume data. By employing these two methods, we can achieve interactive isosurface exploration with high quality rendering.     

基于图像分割的三维重构

三维重构方法是医学图像可视化系统、治疗计划系统的重要技术。基于图像分割的三维重构方法结合了图像分割、等值面抽取、网格简化三种技术,是不同于传统Marching Cubes算法的一种三维重构方法。它首先将医学图像分割为二值图,然后利用Marching Cubes方法进行等值面抽取,最后对得到的网格模型进行简化。实验结果表明,基于图像分割的三维重构方法加快了Marching Cubes的运算速度,改善了重构的效果,有利于实现对基于三维重构的大型几何模型的实时绘制和交互。     

Scalable isosurface visualization of massive datasets on commodity off-the-shelf clusters

Tomographic imaging and computer simulations are increasingly yielding massive datasets. Interactive and exploratory visualizations have rapidly become indispensable tools to study large volumetric imaging and simulation data. Our scalable isosurface visualization framework on commodity off-the-shelf clusters is an end-to-end parallel and progressive platform, from initial data access to the final display. Interactive browsing of extracted isosurfaces is made possible by using parallel isosurface extraction, and rendering in conjunction with a new specialized piece of image compositing hardware called Metabuffer. In this paper, we focus on the back end scalability by introducing a fully parallel and out-of-core isosurface extraction algorithm. It achieves scalability by using both parallel and out-of-core processing and parallel disks. It statically partitions the volume data to parallel disks with a balanced workload spectrum, and builds I/O-optimal external interval trees to minimize the number of I/O operations of loading large data from disk. We also describe an isosurface compression scheme that is efficient for progress extraction, transmission and storage of isosurfaces.     

网格模型的简化算法研究

在计算机图形学中,常采用多边形网格描述物体模型.由于绘制时间和存储量与多边形的数量成正比,因此必须对网格模型进行简化.文章通过分析几类网格模型简化算法,研究了目前存在的主要问题,提出了解决的方法.     

一种基于国标人体测量学数据的虚拟人建模方法

针对目前利用国标人体测量学数据构建的虚拟人模型,只有单一的骨骼层或皮肤层,不便于同时对虚拟人进行实时运动控制和皮肤动态变形研究的问题,提出一种利用GB 10000-88的19个人体测量学特征数据、用3ds max构造出虚拟人的皮肤网格、层级建模方法构建出虚拟人的骨骼关节运动模型与四元数球面混合插值技术相结合的虚拟人建模方法。实验结果表明,该方法构建的虚拟人双层模型有利于对准确的国标人体测量学数据的虚拟人角色进行建模、皮肤逼真变形、实时运动仿真和人机工效学分析。     

Transient response of inelastic shells of revolution

The paper presents a transient response finite difference solution in space and time for the shell of revolution equations derived by Sanders. Inelastic constitutive relationships and nonlinear kinematics are included. The spatial differencing technique is based on a checkerboard half-spacing mesh configuration that allows the use of lower order difference expressions than those normally used for accuracy. Several example problems are considered which illustrate convergence for elastic and elastic-plastic problems. Experimental results for cylindrical shells are compared with predictions based on linear and nonlinear kinematics, various mesh spacings, and constitutive differences.     

一种新的基于顶点聚类的网格简化算法1)

In computer graphics,models are often discribed by polygonal meshes.Because the rendering and storage cost is proportional to the number of polygons,too large models are not practical.Model simplification techniques are widely used in computer graphics fields such as computer animation,virtual reality and interactive scientific visualization.In this paper a new algorithm of mesh simplification based on vertex clustering is presented.The algorithm adopts octree structure to subdivide the mesh model adaptively.A new error control method is also presented.The implementation of the algorithm is simple and it runs very fast.Examples illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm.     

一种新的基于顶点聚类的网格简化算法

在计算机图形学中,经常采用多边形网格来描述物体模型.由于绘制时间和存储量 与多边形的数量成正比,过于庞大的物体网格模型通常是不实用的.模型简化在计算机动画、 虚拟现实和交互式可视化等计算机图形应用领域有着广阔的应用前景.为此提出一种新的基 于顶点聚类的网格简化算法.该算法利用八叉树对网格进行自适应划分,给出了一种基于点 到平面距离的有效的误差控制方法,并能在用户指定的误差范围内通过使原始网格中的顶点 聚类达到大量简化的目的.该算法实现简单,速度快且能很好地保持边界特征.给出的一组图 例说明了该算法的有效性.     

对体可视化Marching Cube算法的改进

提出一个由三维数据计算等值面中点的算法,它在两方面对标准Ｍａｒｃｈｉｎｇ Ｃｕｂｅ算法进行了改进。第一个改进是：在等值面上样本点的状态依赖于它所连接的边同等值面相交的数目;第二个改进是：两相邻样本点中等值面多边形顶点被定位于中点,使得共面三角片合并为一个多边莆,减少了生成多边形的数量,提高了算法效率。     

基于MC算法的医学建模方法与研究

针对现有医学图像特点,提出了一种医学三维建模的新方法.该方法基于传统MC算法,结合种子填充思想进行等值面扩展,并利用DMC方法进行插值位置取代,最后直接连接等值点生成多边形网,从而减少了面片数量,很好的解决了二义性问题.实验表明,该方法较传统方法在拓扑结构、存储空间和处理速度方面均有较大改善.     

Field functions for implicit surfaces

The use of 3D computer generated models is a rapidly growing part of the animation industry. But the established modelling techniques, using polygons or parametric patches, are not the best to define characters which can change their shape as they move. A newer method, using iso-surfaces in a scalar field, enables us to create models that can make the dynamic shape changes seen in hand animation. We call such modelsSoft Objects.From the user's point of view, a soft object is built from primitive key objects that blend to form a compound shape. In this paper, we examine some of the problems of choosing suitable keys and introduce some new field functions that increase the range of shapes available as keys.     

Three-axis NC milling simulation based on adaptive triangular mesh

NC milling simulation has become an important step in computer aided manufacturing (CAM). To achieve real-time simulation, the total number of polygons has to be reduced, which results in poor image quality. This paper presents an adaptive triangular mesh algorithm to reduce the number of polygons while image quality remains high. Binary tree is used to represent the milling surface, and the optimization of the mesh is performed dynamically in the process of simulation. In this algorithm, the resolution of triangles is automatically updated according to local surface flatness, thus greatly reducing the number of triangles at planar regions. By doing this, real-time and high quality of visual presentation is insured and the translation, rotation and zooming operations are still applicable. When machining precision is evaluated, or overcut, undercut and interference are inspected, full resolution model stored in memory is automatically loaded to ensure the accuracy and correctness of these inspections. Finally, an example is presented to illustrate the validity of proposed algorithm.