Edge Transformations for Improving Mesh Quality of Marching Cubes

Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2009-01, Vol.15 (1), p.150-159
Main Authors: Dietrich, C.A., Scheidegger, C.E., Schreiner, J., Comba, J.L.D., Nedel, L.P., Silva, C.T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceleration
Algorithms
and object representations
Applications
Computer Graphics
Computer Simulation
Cubes
Curve
Experiments
Extraction
Histograms
Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted - methods
Isosurfaces
Iterative algorithms
Marching cubes algorithms
Mesh generation
Models, Theoretical
Pervasive computing
Robustness
Sampling methods
Smoothing
Smoothing methods
solid
Studies
surface
Transformations
Triangles
User-Computer Interface
Visual
Visualization
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Summary:Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often addressed through post processing operations such as smoothing. As we demonstrate in experiments with several datasets, while these improve the mesh, they do not remove all degeneracies, and incur an increased and unbounded error between the resulting mesh and the original isosurface. Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates. This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted mesh. In our experiments, our method did not create a single degenerate triangle, unlike any other method we experimented with. Our method incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring at most twice the execution time of the original Marching Cubes algorithm in our experiments. Most importantly, it can be readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations, and is orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (particularly, performance enhancements such as out-of-core and acceleration structures).
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2008.60