Sweeping Simplices: A Fast Iso-Surface Extraction Algorithm for Unstructured Grids

  • Authors:
  • Han-Wei Shen;Christopher R. Johnson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT;Department of Computer Science, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT

  • Venue:
  • VIS '95 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Visualization '95
  • Year:
  • 1995

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Abstract

We present an algorithm that accelerates the extraction of iso-surfaces from unstructured grids by avoiding the traversal of the entire set of cells in the volume. The algorithm consists of a sweep algorithm and a data decomposition scheme. The sweep algorithm incrementally locates intersected elements, and the data decomposition scheme restricts the algorithm's worst-case performance. For data sets consisting of hundreds of thousands of elements, our algorithm can reduce the cell traversal time more than 90% over the naive iso-surface extraction algorithm, thus facilitating interactive probing of scalar fields for large-scale problems on unstructured three-dimensional grids.