Transparent fused visualization of surface and volume based on iso-surface highlighting

Abstract

Computer Graphics technology enables a three-dimensional representation of object’s shape and inner structure. It is widely used in the field of visualization and simulation such as computer-aided design, scientific visualization, and medical simulation. Recent studies on implicit surface generation from shape measured three-dimensional point cloud data provide precise and refined surface visualization for complex objects from buildings and tangible heritages to the internal structure of the human body. However, to understand and analyze the structural characteristics of complex shapes, conventional methods, which visualize the whole object with one criterion, could not produce satisfactory results. A more comprehensive visualization method that extracts and highlights the edges and feature regions of a complex object is desired. In this paper, we propose a fused visualization method that extracts and highlights the shape characteristics of three-dimensional volume data of the human body. For the implicit surface generation, volume stochastic process sampling method is applied. The surface curvature is then calculated by projecting the mathematically well-defined curvature information at a point on the iso-surface to its tangent plane. The high curvature area is extracted as the feature region and transparently fused with the original volume data. The proposed method, which realizes three-dimensional transparent fusion of feature-highlighted iso-surface visualization and volume visualization, comprehensively visualizes global structure of the target medical data as well as emphasizes the structural characteristics in the feature region.