Volume warping for adaptive isosurface extraction

Polygonal approximations of isosurfaces extracted from uniformly sampled volumes are increasing in size due to the availability of higher resolution imaging techniques. The large number of primitives represented hinders the interactive exploration of the dataset. Though many solutions have been proposed to this problem, many require the creation of isosurfaces at multiple resolutions or the use of additional data structures, often hierarchical, to represent the volume. We propose a technique for adaptive isosurface extraction that is easy to implement and allows the user to decide the degree of adaptivity as well as the choice of isosurface extraction algorithm. Our method optimizes the extraction of the isosurface by warping the volume. In a warped volume, areas of importance (e.g. containing significant details) are inflated while unimportant ones are contracted. Once the volume is warped, any extraction algorithm can be applied. The extracted mesh is subsequently unwarped such that the warped areas are rescaled to their initial proportions. The resulting isosurface is represented by a mesh that is more densely sampled in regions decided as important.