Isosurface extraction in time-varying fields using a temporal branch-on-need tree (T-BON)
Philip M. Sutton, Charles D. Hansen · 1999
The Temporal Branch-on-Need Tree (T-BON) extends the threedimensional branch-on-need octree for time-varying isosurface extraction. At each time step, only those portions of the tree and data necessary to construct the current isosurface are read from disk. This algorithm can thus exploit the temporal locality of the isosurface and, as a geometric technique, spatial locality between cells in order to improve performance. Experimental results demonstrate the performance gained and memory overhead saved using this technique. Keywords: isosurface, time-dependent scalar field visualization, multiresolution methods, octree 1 Introduction Isosurface extraction is an important technique for visualizing volumetric data. By exposing contours of constant value, isosurfaces provide a mechanism for understanding the structure of a scalar field. This method has been used effectively in several disciplines, including medicine [12, 18], computational fluid dynamics (CFD) [6, 7], and molecular dynam...