Sweeping simplices: a fast iso-surface extraction algorithm for unstructured grids

Presents an algorithm that accelerates the extraction of iso-surfaces from unstructured grids by avoiding the traversal of the entire set of cells in the volume. The algorithm consists of a sweep algorithm and a data decomposition scheme. The sweep algorithm incrementally locates intersected elements, and the data decomposition scheme restricts the algorithm's worst-case performance. For data sets consisting of hundreds of thousands of elements, our algorithm can reduce the cell traversal time by more than 90% over the naive iso-surface extraction algorithm, thus facilitating interactive probing of scalar fields for large-scale problems on unstructured three-dimensional grids.