Efficient isosurface extraction using marching tetrahedra and histogram pyramids on multiple GPUs

Abstract

The algorithms for isosurface extraction have become crucial in petroleum industry, medicine and many other fields over the last years. Nowadays market demands engender a need for methods that not only construct accurate 3D models but also deal with the problem efficiently. Recently, a few highly optimized approaches taking advantage of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have been published in the literature. However, despite their satisfactory speed, they all may be unsuitable in real-life applications due to limits on maximum domain size they can process. In this paper we present a novel approach to surface extraction by combining the algorithm of Marching Tetrahedra with the idea of Histogram Pyramids. Our GPU-based application can process CT and MRI scan data. Thanks to domain decomposition, the only limiting factor for the size of input instance is the amount of memory needed to store the resulting model. The solution is also immensely fast achieving up to 107-fold speedup comparing to a serial CPU code. Moreover, multiple GPUs support makes it very scalable. Provided tool enables the user to visualize generated model and to modify it in an interactive manner. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.