Volume Warping for Adaptive Isosurface Extraction

Polygonal approximations of isosurfaces extracted from uniformly sampled volumes are increasing in size due to the availability of higher resolution imaging techniques. The large number of primitives represented hinders the interactive exploration of the data set. Though many solutions have been proposed to this problem, many require the creation of isosurfaces at multiple resolutions or the the use of additional data structures, often hierarchical, to represent the volume. We propose a novel methodology for adaptive isosurfaces that is easy to implement and allows the user to decide their degree of adaptivity as well as their choice of isosurface extraction algorithm. The method optimizes isosurface extraction by warping a volume to enlarge areas of high frequency and minimize areas of low fre-quency. Any extraction algorithm can then be used to generate a mesh which is subsequently unwarped. The resulting isosurface is represented by a mesh that is adaptively sampled in regions of significant details.