Reconstruction and simulation of deformable organs with implicit surfaces

This paper describes an automatic procedure for reconstructing a skeletal deformable implicit surface (defined by a connected skeleton and a field function) from a set data points organized in parallel contours. In our solution, instead of calculating directly a connected 3D skeleton of data points, we deduce it from 2D Voronoi skeletons of the contours. In this approach, the key idea for the reconstruction is the use of a uniform field function in order to facilitate the animation and the simulation of the reconstructed object's behavior. This has necessitated to introduce the notion of "weighted skeleton". Another contribution of this work is the proposition of an animation methodology by transforming the skeleton into a deformable mass/spring system. Hence, the constraints applied to the surface are propagated through the skeleton, to deform object's shape. It should be noted that the employ of implicit surfaces, during a simulation process, makes the collision detection very easy.