Component-Based Isosurface Extraction for Multiple Dataset Visualization

In the situations where isosurfaces are comprised of many disjoint components, two or more datasets can be visualized simultaneously by processing only a subset of isosurface components. The components of interest can be selected by exploiting interdataset coherency at the level of individual voxels and components. Thus, only those components (identified as voxel coverages or voxel sets) which differ significantly among the datasets under consideration are extracted as needed while the similar components were extracted only once from a reference dataset. Since the polygons are extracted/rendered as a whole component, the rendered isosurfaces are crack-free. We use three user-defined thresholds to control multiple dataset visualization (MDV) so that important relationships (differences and similarities) among the datasets can be explored with an improvement in the overall performance. If the data-coherency can not be defined easily, MDV can still benefit from the on-the-fly processing of the individual components.