VOLUME WARPING FOR ADAPTIVE ISOSURFACE EXTRACTION

Methods and apparatus solving problems of polygonal approximations of isosurfaces extracted from uniformly sampled volumes 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. Examples of methods are provided for adaptive isosurface extraction that are generally easy to implement and allows the user to decide the degree of adaptivity as well as the choice of isosurface extraction algorithm. The extraction of the isosurface is optimized 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.