Thickening the colored regions in a color volume dataset

The colored regions in the surface colored models (SCMs) made by the rapid prototyping processes should be of a certain thickness, so that they can be post-processed by 'subtracting' processes like grinding. A method based on the principle of mathematical morphology was proposed, which can be used to thicken the colored regions in a color volume dataset (CVD) obtained from slicing an SCM, so that an SCM with thickened colored regions can be formed. The proposed method is simple, robust, and relatively fast. In addition, large CVDs can be processed layer by layer to reduce the memory requirement. The method is meaningful to the data preparation for the rapid forming of the SCMs.