AN EFFICIENCY ENHANCED ISOSURFACE GENERATION ALGORITHM FOR VOLUME VISUALIZATION

An algorithm for computing isosurfaces from 3D volume data is presente d that extends the standard marching-cube algorithm with two modificat ions. The first modification is that in the proposed algorithm, the st atus of a sample point on the isosurface depends on the number of edge s (leading to this vertex) intersected by the isosurface. The second m odification is that polygon vertices between two adjacent sample point s are located at the middle point, which leads, in many cases, to co-p lanar triangles being merged to a polygon. The proposed algorithm redu ces the number of polygons generated and thus increases efficiency, wh ich is confirmed by experiments.