This paper presents a general purpose tool designed to extract charact
eristic curves from 3D images. Our algorithm, called the Marching Line
s, is inspired by isointensity techniques, such as the Marching Cubes.
Marching Lines extracts, with subpixel accuracy, the 3D lines corresp
onding to the intersection of two isosurfaces in a 3D grid. The algori
thm ensures that each reconstructed curve is formed of a connected set
of segments, is closed if the curve is entirely contained in the grid
, does not intersect itself, and is oriented. The main idea is to defi
ne isosurfaces as interfaces (f greater than or equal to 0, f < 0) ins
tead of implicit equation solutions (f = 0). The singularities are sol
ved with an offset technique. Results are presented for synthetic data
and for 3D medical image applications. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.