An Improved Marching Cubes Method for Surface Reconstruction of Volume Data

Applied to the surface rendering, the marching cubes method shows a great promise for surface extraction by using the surface configurations of a cube. But the marching cubes method has some disadvantages, that come from the use of surface configurations of cubes and further restrict the application of this method, including wrong surface production and hole generation. In the paper, we re-assign zero to vertices in the surface and one to vertices on the surface, and then improve the marching cubes algorithm by redefining the configurations for the fifteen cases of configurations proposed in marching cubes method. To evaluate the performance of the improved marching cubes method, we reconstructed the surface for MRI volume data using the improved method along with the marching cubes method. The experimental results show that the improved method can remove the disadvantages mentioned above and obtain a satisfying reconstructed surface