Progressive Hulls: Application on Biomedical Data

A coarse outer hull of a mesh is a good tool used in computer graphics to reduce algorithm complexity, especially, in applications such as collision detection or ray-tracing. It is often required that the hull has some very specific parameters concerning its shape and quality since these influence general flexibility and numerical stability of the algorithms. This paper overviews existing problem approaches, their downsides for coarse outer hull creation, and describes Progressive Hull algorithm, which produces coarse hulls that maintain the general shape of the original triangulated mesh while containing the original mesh inside its interior. However, when this algorithm is used on a biomedical mesh extracted from volumetric data, one can observe frequent artifacts in the produced hull caused by local imperfections in the meshes. In this paper, we, therefore, present a few modifications to the original Progressive Hull algorithm that result not only in a suppression of hull artifacts and a better overall hull quality but also in a shorter execution time.