A Novel Pointcloud-based Isosurface Extraction

In this paper, we present a novel approach of hardware-accelerated pointcloud-based isosurface extraction on tetrahedral cells. In contrast to previous methods, our method takes advantage of programmable capability on the modern graphics hardware to render the isosurface silhouette and reduces the video memory consumption per tetrahedron. We achieve this by using a GPU-based geometry-generating method called fat-point technique. We classify tetrahedra into three isosurface cases and compute corresponding parameters in vertex processors, and then generate implicit isosurface silhouette in fragment processors. Utilizing the high performance OpenGL vertex buffer objects, our algorithm can achieve a rendering rate of three million tetrahedra per second.