Hardware-accelerated Extraction and Rendering of Point Set Surfaces

Point-based models are gaining lately considerable attention as an alternative to traditional surface meshes. In this context, Point Set Surfaces (PSS) were proposed as a modeling and rendering method with important topological and approximation properties. However, ray-tracing PSS is computationally expensive. Therefore, we propose an interactive ray-tracing algorithm for PSS implemented completely on commodity graphics hardware. We also exploit the advantages of PSS to propose a novel technique for extracting surfaces directly from volumetric data. This technique is based on the well known predictor-corrector principle from the numerical methods for solving ordinary differential equations. Our technique provides good approximations to surfaces defined by a certain property in the volume, such as iso-surfaces or surfaces located at regions of high gradient magnitude. Also, local details of the surfaces could be manipulated by changing the local polynomial approximation and the smoothing parameters used. Furthermore, the surfaces generated are smooth and low frequency noise is naturally handled.