Object surface construction from volume data with appropriate topology
Takanori Nagae, Takeshi Agui, Hiroshi Nagahashi · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1994
Abstract The reflection, diffusion, transparency and refraction of a ray on the surface of an object are essential elements to the object. Such optical interference by knowing each intersection of a ray and the surface of the object together with the normal vector at the intersection. In most conventional methods, the surface of an object is detected from a set of volume data, and a shading process is applied to it. This process has a difficulty in forming a continuous surface of an object since the volume data consist of discrete elements. The topology of an object surface also is important in a reconstruction of a 3‐dimensional model (e.g., by laser stereo lithography) in which the surface should be closed with no intersection. This paper proposes two types of algorithms for reconstruction of the surface of an object: the modified marching cubes algorithm (a modification of the marching cubes algorithm); and the deformed cubes algorithm. Each of the proposed algorithms reconstructs a sufficiently smooth and topologically appropriate surface of an object.