Some Improvements of the Fast Marching Method

  • Authors:

  • David L. Chopp

  • Affiliations:

  • -

  • Venue:
  • SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

The fast marching method published by Sethian [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 93 (1996), pp. 1591--1595] is an optimally efficient algorithm for solving problems of front evolution where the front speed is monotonic. It has been used in a wide variety of applications such as robotic path planning [R. Kimmel and J. Sethian, Fast Marching Methods for Computing Distance Maps and Shortest Paths, Tech. Report 669, CPAM, University of California, Berkeley, 1996], crack propagation [M. Stolarska et al., Modelling crack growth by level sets in the extended finite element method, Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg., to appear; Internat. J. Numer. Methods Engrg., 51 (2001), pp. 943--960; N. Sukumar, D. L. Chopp, and B. Moran, Extended finite element method and fast marching method for three-dimensional fatigue crack propagation, J. Comput. Phys., submitted], seismology [J. Sethian and A. Popovici, Geophysics, 64 (1999), pp. 516--523], photolithography [J. Sethian, Fast marching level set methods for three-dimensional photolithography development, in Proceedings of the SPIE 1996 International Symposium on Microlithography, Santa Clara, CA, 1996], and medical imaging [R. Malladi and J. Sethian, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 93 (1996), pp. 9389--9392]. It has also been a valuable tool for the implementation of modern level set methods where it is used to efficiently compute the distance to the front and/or an extended velocity function.In this paper, we improve upon the second order fast marching method of Sethian [SIAM Rev., 41 (1999), pp. 199--235] by constructing a second order approximation of the interface generated from local data on the mesh. The data is interpolated on a single box of the mesh using a bicubic approximation. The distance to the front is then calculated by using a variant of Newton's method to solve both the level curve equation and the orthogonality condition for the nearest point to a given node. The result is a second order approximation of the distance to the interface which can then be used to produce second order accurate initial conditions for the fast marching method and a third order fast marching method.