PHASE: Progressive Hardware Assisted IsoSurface Extraction Framework

Isosurface extraction is an important technique for visualizing three-dimensional scalar fields. During recent years, researchers have created many acceleration methods for isosurface extraction, including the span space representation and view-dependent methods. In this paper, we introduce a progressive view-dependent isosurface extraction method that exhibits a rapid convergence rate to the exact isosurface and is well suited for remote visualization. The proposed method takes advantage of rendering hardware to resolve visibility tests. In contrast to previous view-dependent isosurface extraction methods, our method (PHASE) can quickly augment the current partial extracted isosurface based on a new point of view without the need for a full view-dependent extraction pass.

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