Parallel View-Dependent Isosurface Extraction Using Multi-Pass Occlusion Culling

Presents a parallel algorithm that can effectively extract only the visible portion of isosurfaces. The main focus of our research is to devise a load-balanced and output-sensitive algorithm, that is, each processor will generate approximately the same amount of triangles, and cells that do not contain the visible isosurface will not be visited. A multi-pass algorithm is proposed to achieve these goals. In the algorithm, we first use an octree data structure to rapidly skip the empty cells. An image space visibility culling technique is then used to identify the visible isosurface cells in a progressive manner. To distribute the workload, we use a binary image space partitioning method to ensure that each processor will generate approximately the same amount of triangles. Isosurface extraction and visibility update are performed in parallel to reduce the total computation time. In addition to reducing the size of output geometry and accelerating the process of isosurface extraction, the multi-pass nature of our algorithm can also be used to perform time-critical computation

Functional representation and manipulation of shapes with applications in surface and solid modeling

Real-valued functions have wide applications in various areas within computer graphics. In this work, we examine three representation of shapes using functions. In particular, we study the classical B-spline representation of piece-wise polynomials in the univariate domain. We provide a generalization of B-spline to the bivariate domain using intuition gained from the univariate construction. We also study the popular scheme of representing 3D density distribution using a uniform, rectilinear grid, where we provide a novel contouring scheme that culls occluded inner geometries. Lastly, we examine a ray-based representation for 3D indicator functions called ray-rep, for which we present a novel meshing scheme with multi-material extensions

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2013

Proceedings of the 7th Annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Student Capstone Conference held on April 11, 2013 at VMASC in Suffolk, Virginia