Tetrahedra Based Volume Visualization

Volume Visualization techniques have advanced considerably since the rst international symposium held on this topic eight years ago. This paper brieey reviews the techniques proposed for the visualization of irregular (or scattered) volume datasets. In particular, methods which adopt simplicial de-compositions of E 3 space are considered, and this choice is justiied both in terms of modeling and visualization. Simplicial complexes are powerful and robust geometric structures, and a number of eecient visualization algorithms have been proposed. We show that simplicial cells (or simply tetrahedral cells since our target is 3D space) may be conceived as being the unifying kernel primitive for the visualization of not-regular meshes.