Speeding Up the Generation of Semi-Translucent Multiple Isosurfaces Using 3D Span Space

Abstract

Isosurface is a set of points where scalar values are constant, and it generally forms surfaces. Simultaneous display of multiple semi-translucent isosurfaces on a screen is useful for visualizing large-scale 3D data. It realizes comprehensive representation of the 3D scalar fields, as well as volume rendering techniques. In this paper, we focus on visualization of 3D scalar field composed of volume data by means of semi-translucent multiple isosurface plots. A new method for displaying semi-translucent multiple isosurfaces will be proposed to fulfill realtime rendering of scalar fields. ISSUE is a known algorithm to quickly generate isosurfaces. ISSUE uses 2D span spaces where minimum values of elements are assigned to horizontal axis, and maximum values of elements are assigned to vertical axis. In our algorithm, elements of volumes are placed onto a 3D span space. The third axis is the distance from the view point. Our algorithms can quickly search for elements intersecting with isosurfaces using the span space in the descending order of distances from the view point, and realize representation of semi-translucent multiple isosurfaces.