A type-merging algorithm for extracting an isosurface from volumetric data

Abstract

A new approach for reducing the number of triangles representing an isosurface in volumetric data is presented. The basic idea is to classify the configurations of the marching cubes approach into types. Surface patches traversing neighboring cubes of the same type can be merged into patches, which can be approximated with fewer and larger triangles. Experimental results show that the number of triangles is about 50% of that obtained with the marching cubes algorithm, with comparable image quality. The execution time is somewhat longer than that of the marching cubes algorithm.