Self-intersection Free and Topologically Faithful Slicing of Implicit Solid

We present a robust and efficient approach to directly slicing implicit solids. Different from prior slicing techniques that reconstruct contours on the slicing plane by tracing the topology of intersected line segments, which is actually not robust, we generate contours through a topology guaranteed contour extraction on binary images sampled from given solids and a subsequent contour simplification algorithm which has the topology preserved and the geometric error controlled. The resultant contours are free of self-intersection, topologically faithful to the given r-regular solids and with shape error bounded; therefore, correct objects can be fabricated from them by rapid prototyping. Moreover, since we do not need to generate the tessellated B-rep of given solids, our approach is memory efficient – only the binary image and the finest contours on one particular slicing plane need to be stored in-core. Our method is general and can be applied to any implicit representations of solids.