Abstract
Volume datasets tend to grow larger and larger as modern technology advances, thus imposing a storage constraint on most systems. One general solution to alleviate this problem is to apply volume compression on volume datasets. However, as volume rendering is often the most important reason why a volume dataset was generated in the first place, we must take into account how a volume dataset could be efficiently rendered when it is stored in a compressed form. Our previous work [21] has shown that it is possible to perform an on-the-fly direct volume rendering from irregular volume data. In this paper, we further extend that work to demonstrate that a similar integration can also be achieved on iso-surface extraction and volume decompression for irregular volume data. In particular, our work involves a dataset decomposition process, where instead of a coordinate-based decomposition used by conventional out-of-core iso-surface extraction algorithms, we choose to use a layer-based structure. Each such layer contains a collection of tetrahedra whose associated scalar values fall within a specific range, and can be compressed independently to reduce its storage requirement. The layer structure is particularly suitable for out-of-core iso-surface extraction, where the required memory exceeds the physical memory capacity of the machine that the process is running on. Furthermore, with this work, we can perform on-the-fly iso-surface extraction during decompression, and the computation only involves the layer that contains the query value, rather than the entire dataset. Experiments show that our approach can improve the performance up to ten times when compared with the results based on traditional coordinate-based approaches.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bajaj, C.L., Pascucci, V., Schikore, D.R.: Fast isocontouring for improved interactivity. In: Proceedings on 1996 Symposium on Volume Visualization, pp. 39–46 (1996)
Bajaj, C.L., Pascucci, V., Schikore, D.R.: Fast isocontouring for structured and unstructured meshes in any dimension. In: IEEE Visualization ’97 Late Breaking Hot Topics (1997)
Chiang, Y., Silva, C.: I/O optimal isosurface extraction. In: IEEE Visualization ’97, pp. 293–300 (1997)
Chiang, Y., Silva, C., Schroeder, W.: Interactive out-of-core isosurface extraction. In: IEEE Visualization ’98, pp. 167–174 (1998)
Cignoni, P., Marino, P., Montani, C., Puppo, E., Scopigno, R.: Speeding up isosurface extraction using interval trees. IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graph. 3(2), 158–170 (1997)
Edelsbrunner, H.: Dynamic data structures for orthogonal intersection queries. Tech. Rep. Report F59, Inst. Informationsverarb., Tech. University Graz (1980)
Gallagher, R.S.: Span filtering: an optimization scheme for volume visualization of large finite element models. In: IEEE Visualization ’91, pp. 68–75 (1991)
Guéziec, A., Bossen, F., Taubin, G., Silva, C.T.: Efficient compression of non-manifold polygonal meshes. In: IEEE Visualization ’99, pp. 73–80 (1999)
Hong, W., Kaufman, A.E.: Feature preserved volume simplification. In: ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications 2003, pp. 334–339 (2003)
Hung, C., Yang, C.: A simple and novel seed-set finding approach for iso-surface extraction. In: EuroVis 2005 – Eurographics/IEEE-VGTC Symposium on Visualization, pp. 125–132 (2005)
Itoh, T., Koyamada, K.: Automatic isosurface propagation using an extrema graph and sorted boundary cell lists. IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graph. 1(4), 319–327 (1995)
Itoh, T., Yamaguchi, Y., Koyamada, K.: Volume thinning for automatic isosurface propagation. In: IEEE Visualization ’96, pp. 303–310 (1996)
Livnat, Y., Shen, H., Johnson, C.R.: A near optimal isosurface extraction algorithm using the span space. IEEE Trans. Visual. Comput. Graph. 2(1), 73–84 (1996)
Lorensen, W.E., Cline, H.E.: Marching cube: a high resolution 3d surface construction algorithm. Comput. Graph. 21(4), 163–169 (1987)
Ma, K., Abla, G., Lum, E.: Layer data organization for visualizing unstructured-grid data. In: Proceedings of SPIE, Visual Data Exploration and Analysis VIII, pp. 111–120 (2001)
McCreight, E.M.: Efficient algorithms for enumerating intersecting intervals and rectangles. Tech. Rep. Report CSL-80-9, Xerox Palo Alto Res. Center (1980)
Metropolis, N., Rosenbluth, A., Rosenbluth, M., Teller, A., Teller, E.: Equation of state calculations by fast computing machines. J. Chem. Phys. 21(6), 1087–1092 (1953)
Press, W.H., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling, W.T., Flannery, B.P.: Numerical recipes in C, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press (1997)
Rossignac, J., Cardoze, D.: Matchmaker: Manifold breps for non-manifold r-sets. In: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling, pp. 31–41 (1999)
Wilhelms, J., Gelder, A.V.: Octrees for faster isosurface generation. ACM Trans. Graph. 11(3), 201–227 (1992)
Yang, C., Mitra, T., Chiueh, T.: On-the-fly rendering of losslessly compressed irregular volume data. In: Proceedings on Visualization ’2000, pp. 101–108 (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Yang, CK., Chiueh, TC. Integration of volume decompression and out-of-core iso-surface extraction from irregular volume data. Visual Comput 22, 249–265 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-006-0003-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-006-0003-9