Improved Perceptual Representation of Isosurfaces From Volume Data Using Curvature-based Features

• Main Author: Gavrilescu, Marius
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: curvature-based features; Engines; Image quality; information visualization; isosurface representation; Isosurfaces; Light sources; Lighting; Rendering (computer graphics); Shape; Shape measurement; Visual effects; Visual perception; volume rendering
• ISSN: 2473-5698
• DOI: 10.1109/ICSTCC62912.2024.10744636

The representation of relevant information from volume data sets is a challenging task due to the high complexity of the structures and spatial features found in such data. The challenge is to represent such structures and features in a way that makes them easy to visually perceive without causing information overload in the resulting images. To this end, we propose a straightforward means of highlighting various regions from isosurfaces found in volume data, such that the visual perception of important surface details is improved. We use an approach based on curvature analysis to determine variations of the isosurface shape, allowing the accentuation of meaningful surface regions. We show that, while the resulting surface accents alone are enough to improve the display of surface details, combining our method with local illumination significantly contributes to a raised level of perception of the surface shape, as well as to the generation of more comprehensive representations of the underlying data. We present our results through illustrative images of medical CT volumes and perform an evaluation using several state-of-the-art no-reference image quality assessment methods. Additionally, our technique does not require precomputation and is easy to incorporate into existing volume rendering engines.