Compressing isosurfaces generated with marching cubes

The marching cubes (MC) algorithm has been widely used for isosurface generation in volume rendering. However, it usually generates an extensive amount of geometric data that requires enormous storage and communication bandwidth. This work presents a geometry compression algorithm that employs several geometric properties of the MC algorithm to reduce the number of bits of generated triangle data. The proposed algorithm attempts to encode each triangle-vertex according to the index of its containing cube, the index of its containing cube-edge, and its relative position on the containing cubeedge. Furthermore, the connectivity among triangle-vertices in a cube is encoded by the signs of its vertices, computed by comparing their values to the isosurface threshold. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve an excellent compression ratio.

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