Reconstruction of topologically correct and adaptive trilinear isosurfaces

The goal of the paper is to fit trilinear iso-surfaces out of volume data, by adopting an adaptive mesh refinement approach and therefore supporting a higher accuracy with respect to standard MC solutions. In order to be correct, adaptive refinement must be applied to a topologically correct initial mesh patch. For this reason, we designed a new, exhaustive look(-)up(-)table (ELUT) which encodes multi-entry patterns for each ambiguous configuration. Following the solution proposed by Natarajan, for each ambiguous configuration we choose, at run time, the actual pattern by evaluating the corresponding set of saddle points. Once the corresponding starting patch has been read from the ELUT, it is adaptively refined to fulfill a user-selected accuracy. Refinement is adaptive to ensure that the complexity of the fitted mesh will not become excessive. An evaluation of the results produced on some volume data set is reported, both in terms of accuracy and complexity of the meshes obtained. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.