Acceleration of the Marching Cubes Technique for Volumetric Visualization on Graphics Processing Unit Using Spatial Data Structures
Marcos Cirne, Hélio Pedrini · 2011
Volume rendering has several applications that benefit many domains of knowledge, such as medicine, biology, geology, and virtual reality. One of the most widely used methods for real-time visualization of data volumes is the marching cubes, which is part of a class of visualization techniques called isosurface extraction. Due to the constant evolution of graphics processing units, it is possible to obtain considerable rendering rates and a high degree of realism. This work describes a methodology for accelerating the marching cubes algorithm on a graphics processing unit and presents some possible ways to improve its performance through auxiliary spatial data structures. Experiments using several volumetric datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.