Hardware-accelerated reconstruction of polygonal isosurface representations on unstructured grids

Volume visualization using isosurface extraction is a well-researched topic. Recent research demonstrated that even for unstructured grids peak performances of millions of tetrahedra per second can be achieved by exploiting the parallel processing capabilities of modem GPUs. In this paper we present a novel hardware-accelerated solution that further improves the extraction performance. In contrary to existing approaches, our technique explicitly extracts the isosurface geometry in a fragment program by rendering only a single screen-sized quadrilateral. The extracted geometry is directly written to an on-board graphics memory object allowing for direct rendering without further bus transfers. Additionally, the geometry can be manipulated by shader programs or read back to the application for further processing. Examples and application scenarios are given that can benefit from our approach.