Interactive View-Dependent Rendering of Large Iso-Surfaces

The authors present an algorithm for interactively extracting and rendering iso-surfaces of large volume datasets in a view-dependent optimal fashion. A recursive tetrahedral mesh subdivision scheme, based on longest edge bisection, is used to hierarchically decompose the data into a multi-resolution structure. This data structure allows fast extraction of arbitrary iso-surfaces to within user specified view-dependent error bounds. A compact encoding of the mesh subdivision optimizes memory usage and processor performance necessary for large datasets. A data layout scheme based on hierarchical space filling curves provides optimal access to the data in a cache coherent manner