Maintaining Sharp Features in Surface Construction for Volumetric Objects

Abstract

Discretized Marching Cubes (DMC) is a standard method in computer graphics and visualization for constructing 3D surfaces in data represented on a regular grid. After thresholding, it builds high-resolution surfaces by tiling surface patches halfway between objects and background in the data. This paper shows that if surfaces are built locally, in a high-resolution sub-grid of a cell instead of directly in a cell, sharp surfaces can be generated in order to preserve concave and convex object features. The main advantage is the improved geometric models that are extracted. This makes lower approximation errors and lower triangle counts possible.