Simplified patterns for extracting the isosurfaces of solid objects

By moving the positions of isosurface vertice from the cube edge interpolation points as in the standard marching cubes (MC), to the centers of the corresponding occupied cube vertices, this paper presents a set of much simpler triangulation patterns for isosurface extraction. Compared with the MC algorithm, the new design gives much fewer triangles, less extraction time, and exhibits remarkable resistance against dot noises, and the generated isosurface somewhat retains the object sharpness on convex surfaces. Among the whole 256 cases, the MC algorithm utilizes 254 for triangulation, while the present algorithm considers only 178. On the assumption that each case occurs once, 820 triangles will be extracted in the standard MC algorithm, while the present algorithm creates only 308 triangles. Extraction results using solid shapes and a real anatomical dataset demonstrate the considerable reduction in vertices, edges, triangles, and extracting time via the present patterns, with comparable rendering quality with the MC approach. And extraction experiments on 2 noisy datasets further verified the strong resistance to dot noise of the present algorithm.