An efficiency enhanced isosurface generation algorithm for volume visualization

Abstract. 

An algorithm for computing isosurfaces from 3D volume data is presented that extends the standard marching-cube algorithm with two modifications. The first modification is that in the proposed algorithm, the status of a sample point on the isosurface depends on the number of edges (leading to this vertex) intersected by the isosurface. The second modification is that polygon vertices between two adjacent sample points are located at the middle point, which leads, in many cases, to co-planar triangles being merged to a polygon. The proposed algorithm reduces the number of polygons generated and thus increases efficiency, which is confirmed by experiments.