Fast extraction and rendering of isosurfaces from 4D data

For visualisation of time-dependent data sets, interactive isosurface extraction and rendering is desirable. It allows the user to study the development of a surface shape in time, such as a moving front or an evolving object shape. For this purpose, the user must be able to interactively specify an iso value, and a sequence of isosurfaces must be visualised, starting from any time step, in forward or backward direction in time. In this paper, we describe efficient and tightly coupled techniques for time-dependent isosurface extraction and rendering at interactive frame rates. In preprocessing, we create data structures from a time-dependent data set, which allows real-time extraction of all iso value-spanning cells, achieving rates of several hundreds of frames per second. These iso valued cells are then passed to a fast hardware-assisted direct point rendering algorithm for display, thus avoiding time expensive surface construction by triangulation. This algorithm makes effective use of the available graphics hardware.

@InProceedings { VBP04b,
  author       = "Vrolijk, Benjamin and Botha, Charl P. and Post, Frits H.",
  title        = "Fast extraction and rendering of isosurfaces from 4D data",
  booktitle    = "ASCI 2004 - Proceedings of the 10th annual conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging",
  month        = "June",
  year         = "2004",
  editor       = "J. J. van Wijk and J. W. J. Heijnsdijk and K. G. Langendoen and R. Veltkamp",
  note         = "90-803086-9-2",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2004/VBP04b"
}