| Isocontouring is the extraction of constant
valued curves and surfaces from 2d and 3d scalar fields. Display and interactive
control of isocontours is helpful in determining the behavior of a scalar
field over time.
Straightforward isocontouring techniques examine each cell of a mesh
to test for intersection with the isocontour of interest. Accelerated isocontouring
can be achieved by preprocessing of the data to establish a "seed
set" of cells which contains at least one cell from each connected
component of each isocontour. From this typically small set of cells, we
apply contour propagation to track a contour through cell adjacencies.
To provide an advantage in worst-case computational complexity, the seed
set is further preprocessed into an optimal O(log n) search structure,
such as the interval tree or segment tree. Total complexity is O(log n
+ k), where n is the size of the seed set, and k is the number of cells
intersected by the surface. In practice, speedups of 2-40 times are achieved.
Fast Isocontouring for Improved Interactivity,
C. Bajaj, V. Pascucci, D. Schikore
1996 Symposium on Volume Visualization
San Francisco, CA
Oct 27-28, 1996
The images and movie below are isosurfaces of wind speed from
a climate model simulation.
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