Real Time Isosurface Browsing

As volumetric datasets get larger, exploring the data sets becomes more difficult and tedious. Two approaches have previously been used to solve this problem: presentation of an abstraction of the data and acceleration of extraction and rendering of the data. We present a user centered approach which decouples the volume visualisation into two modes. Selection of the mode is done based on the user's actions. The first mode uses traditional isosurface rendering and extraction techniques and is applied when the user knows the isovalue of interest. The second mode uses a novel view dependent, sampling based isosurface rendering and extraction technique, which allows interactive browsing of the isosurfaces