Dynamic isosurface extraction and level-of-detail in voxel space

摘要

A new visualization technique is reported, which dramatically improves interactivity for scientific visualizations by working directly with voxel data and by employing efficient algorithms and data structures. This discussion covers the research software, the file structures, examples of data creation, data search, and triangle rendering codes that allow geometric surfaces to be extracted from volumetric data. The key idea behind this visualization paradigm is that various levels-of-detail are represented as differently sized hexahedral virtual voxels, which are stored in a three-dimensional kd-tree; thus the level-of-detail representation is done in voxel space instead of the traditional approach which relies on surface or geometry space decimations. This algorithm has been implemented as an integral component in the EIGEN/VR project at Sandia National Laboratories, which provides a rich environment for scientists to interactively explore and visualize the results of very large-scale simulations performed on massively parallel supercomputers.