An Integrated and Efficient Voxel-based Rendering System : from Discrete Skeleton Shape Descriptor to Implicit Surface Visualization

This paper presents a new algorithm of volume rendering based on a dual representation of data in order to improve at the same time the image generation speed and its quality. Two shapes descriptors are used then to characterize the object : an Euclidean Distance Transform (EDT) and a digital Euclidean skeleton. The EDT is used at a time to accelerate the image generation and compute the skeleton of this shape, whereas skeleton is used as an initialization to the processing of the implicit surface. The goal consists in the obtaining of an interactive system of visualization for the analysis of volumetric data, either in the setting of a qualitative exploration, or like a guide in the qualitative measures. The speed of treatments associated with a good visualization would give the feasibility to achieve in an interactive manner, a 3D survey of a natural object. The method has been successfully applied to both synthetic and real data.