Volume-Enclosing Surface Extraction

A new method is presented here, which allows one to construct triangular surfaces from three-dimensional data sets, such as 3D image data and/or numerical simulation data that are based on regularly shaped, cubic lattices. This novel volume-enclosing surface extraction technique, which has been named VESTA, is guaranteed to always produce surfaces that do not contain any holes, e.g., in contrast to the well-known and very popular Marching Cubes algorithm, which has been developed by W.E. Lorensen and H.E. Cline in the mid-1980s. VESTA is not template based. In fact, the surface tiles are determined with a fast and robust construction technique. Among other things, VESTA's relationship to the DICONEX algorithm is explained, which -- in a lower-dimensional analogy -- produces contours from two-dimensional data sets, such as 2D gray-level images. In particular, the generation of isosurfaces from initially created VESTA surfaces is demonstrated here for the very first time. A few examples are provided, namely in the fields of x-ray microtomography and relativistic hydrodynamic fireball simulations of heavy-ion collisions, respectively.