HistoPyramids in Iso-Surface Extraction

We present an implementation approach to high-speed Marching Cubes, running entirely on the Graphics Processing Unit of Shader Model 3.0 and 4.0 graphics hardware. Our approach is based on the interpretation of Marching Cubes as a stream compaction and expansion process, and is implemented using the HistoPyramid, a hierarchical data structure previously only used in GPU data compaction. We extend the HistoPyramid structure to allow for stream expansion, which provides an efficient method for generating geometry directly on the GPU, even on Shader Model 3.0 hardware. Currently, our algorithm outperforms all other known GPU-based iso-surface extraction algorithms. We describe our implementation and present a performance analysis on several generations of graphics hardware.