Difference between revisions of "ImprovingMeshQualityOfMarchingCubes"

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== The paper ==
[[Image:Macet_paper_teaser.png]]


Carlos Dietrich, Joao Comba, Luciana Nedel, Carlos Scheidegger, John Schreiner, Claudio Silva. Edge Transformations for Improving Mesh Quality of Marching Cubes. 2007, submitted.
Carlos Dietrich, Joao Comba, Luciana Nedel, Carlos Scheidegger, John Schreiner, Claudio Silva. Edge Transformations for Improving Mesh Quality of Marching Cubes. 2007, submitted.


== Reproducing the results ==
=== Abstract ===


The results in this paper can be completely reproduced using open-source software and publicly available datasets. We will soon post here the set of workflows needed to run the experiments directly in VisTrails, along with the necessary software.
Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface
extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and
efficiency.  One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the
quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly
shaped and degenerate triangles.
This issue is often addressed
through post processing operations such as smoothing.  As we
describe, while these improve the mesh, they do not remove all
degeneracies, and incur an increased and unbounded error between the
resulting mesh and the  original isosurface. 
Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method
to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates.
This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted
isosurface. In our experiments, it did not create a single
degenerate triangle, unlike any other method we experimented with.
Our method essentially eliminates postprocessing related to mesh
quality. We show improvements in subsequent mesh processing,
using the generated surface directly as input to a tetrahedral mesh
generator.
The method incurs minimal computational overhead,
requiring at most twice the execution time of the original Marching
Cubes algorithm in our experiments. Most importantly, it can be
readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations, and is
orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (such as out-of-core
and acceleration methods). The method can also be directly applied
to other related isosurface extraction algorithms such as Marching
Tetrahedra, and Marching Octahedra.


== Necessary software ==
== Get the software ==


[http://www.sci.utah.edu/~cscheid/software/ectmc/ectmc.zip ZIP File]
To compile the basic software, which generates isosurfaces using Macet, you will need [http://teem.sourceforge.net teem] and [http://www.boost.org boost] to be installed. There is a linux makefile and a Visual Studio solution file available. The source is available [http://www.sci.utah.edu/~cscheid/software/macet.tar.gz here (.tar.gz)] or [http://www.sci.utah.edu/~cscheid/software/macet.zip here (.zip)]


[http://www.sci.utah.edu/~cscheid/software/ectmc/ectmc.tar.gz Gzipped tarball]
== Usage ==
 
To generate a macet isosurface:
 
./macet <nrrd_file> <iso_value> <output_off_file> -isCombined
 
To generate a regular Marching Cubes isosurface:
 
./macet <nrrd_file> <iso_value> <output_off_file>

Latest revision as of 20:39, 21 June 2007

Macet paper teaser.png

Carlos Dietrich, Joao Comba, Luciana Nedel, Carlos Scheidegger, John Schreiner, Claudio Silva. Edge Transformations for Improving Mesh Quality of Marching Cubes. 2007, submitted.

Abstract

Marching Cubes is a popular choice for isosurface extraction from regular grids due to its simplicity, robustness, and efficiency. One of the key shortcomings of this approach is the quality of the resulting meshes, which tend to have many poorly shaped and degenerate triangles. This issue is often addressed through post processing operations such as smoothing. As we describe, while these improve the mesh, they do not remove all degeneracies, and incur an increased and unbounded error between the resulting mesh and the original isosurface. Rather than modifying the resulting mesh, we propose a method to modify the grid on which Marching Cubes operates. This modification greatly increases the quality of the extracted isosurface. In our experiments, it did not create a single degenerate triangle, unlike any other method we experimented with. Our method essentially eliminates postprocessing related to mesh quality. We show improvements in subsequent mesh processing, using the generated surface directly as input to a tetrahedral mesh generator. The method incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring at most twice the execution time of the original Marching Cubes algorithm in our experiments. Most importantly, it can be readily integrated in existing Marching Cubes implementations, and is orthogonal to many Marching Cubes enhancements (such as out-of-core and acceleration methods). The method can also be directly applied to other related isosurface extraction algorithms such as Marching Tetrahedra, and Marching Octahedra.

Get the software

To compile the basic software, which generates isosurfaces using Macet, you will need teem and boost to be installed. There is a linux makefile and a Visual Studio solution file available. The source is available here (.tar.gz) or here (.zip)

Usage

To generate a macet isosurface:

./macet <nrrd_file> <iso_value> <output_off_file> -isCombined

To generate a regular Marching Cubes isosurface:

./macet <nrrd_file> <iso_value> <output_off_file>