A new unsupervised cube-based algorithm for iso-surface generation

This paper introduces a new algorithm which automatically produces polygonal representations of 3D structures within a volume data set built from a stack of parallel cross-sections. Several methods of 3D surface reconstruction have already been proposed ranging from heuristic approaches for constructing 3D surfaces from 2D contours to the Marching Cubes (MC) approach where the different configurations are checked systematically. Instead, we define a cube-to-cube connection based upon geometrical closeness provided by convex hulls computation. We further evaluate the precision of 3D models reconstructed from synthetic and real data obtained in confocal microscopy and compare it with the conventional MC algorithm. We also discuss improvements that allow to reduce the number of generated surface patches and the ability to be used in 3D quantitative tasks.