Numerical Visualization by Rapid Isosurface Extractions Using 3D Span Spaces

摘要

In this paper, we focus on visualization of a 3D scalar field composed of volume data by means of semi-transparent multiple isosurface extraction. A new method for displaying semi-transparent multiple isosurfaces will be proposed to fulfill real-time rendering of scalar fields. The proposed method is considered to be an extension of ISSUE, which is a known algorithm to quickly generate isosurfaces. ISSUE uses a 2D span space, where minimum values of computational cells are assigned to the horizontal axis, and maximum values of cells are assigned to the vertical axis. In the proposed algorithm, computational cells are placed onto a 3D span space. The third axis is the distance from the viewpoint. The proposed algorithm can quickly search for the cells intersecting with isosurfaces using the span space in back-to-front order and can realize representation of semi-transparent multiple isosurfaces.