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Efficient ray casting polygonized isosurface of binary volumes

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Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient grid-based ray casting method for rendering polygonized isosurfaces of binary volumes as a special form of voxel art. We utilize an auxiliary multi-level data structure, the region index layer, to accelerate empty space leaping. We also construct the polygonal surfaces within each cell as constructive solid geometry (CSG) combinations of half-space subvolumes to reduce boundary checks in the intersection test. We describe the construction method of the region index layer and CSG cube configurations and demonstrate how to utilize these data structures to enhance the performance of the ray casting algorithms.

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Acknowledgements

This project is funded in part by National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant CNS-1337722: Development of Large-Scale Dense Scene Capture and Tracking Instrument.

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National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Grant CNS-1337722: Development of Large-Scale Dense Scene Capture and Tracking Instrument.

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  1. George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

    Wei Li & James K. Hahn

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  1. Wei Li
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  2. James K. Hahn
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Correspondence to Wei Li.

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Li, W., Hahn, J.K. Efficient ray casting polygonized isosurface of binary volumes. Vis Comput 37, 3139–3149 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-021-02302-3

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