Tetrahedra Based Volume Visualization

. Volume Visualization techniques have advanced considerably since the first international symposium held on this topic eight years ago. This paper briefly reviews the techniques proposed for the visualization of irregular (or scattered) volume datasets. In particular, methods which adopt simplicial decompositions of E 3 space are considered, and this choice is justified both in terms of modeling and visualization. Simplicial complexes are powerful and robust geometric structures, and a number of efficient visualization algorithms have been proposed. We show that simplicial cells (or simply tetrahedral cells since our target is 3D space) may be conceived as being the unifying kernel primitive for the visualization of not-regular meshes. 1 Introduction A volume dataset consists of points in E 3 space, with one or more scalar or vector sample values associated with each point. The need for a visual representation of the content of such datasets led to a substantial research effort a..