GLOBAL topology preservation in isosurface extraction of volumetric data

Abstract

We study the topology inconsistency between the interested object boundary and the isosurface extracted with Marching Cubes, and present a new method preserving the topology of object boundary. Different from the MC-like algorithms, the new method is not restricted to the Marching Cubes' partition on the grid vertexes: inner or outer vertexes. We find that a pixel curved out by Marching Cubes algorithm maybe include a part of the interested object and it is even a key part for preserving the boundary topology. So the boundary pixel is defined as a pixel that includes the object boundary and it's pixel value is between those of the inner and outer pixel, This paper shows how to find the boundary pixels and the boundary position in it, Thus we can find the object boundary in a pixel whose value is out of the isovalue, which is regarded as background by Marching Cubes algorithm. Experiments based on CT data also verify the effect of the new method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.