A new method on converting polygonal meshes to volumetric datasets

The voxel-based models are used extensively in many fields, such as medical image reconstruction, volume rendering and fluid dynamics, etc. Especially in robotics, voxel-based model is a powerful tool to execute collision detection. Voxelization refers to a process to convert data from one source type into a three dimensional volume dataset. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to voxelize the polygonal meshes into contour voxel representation based on the octree structure. It is proved that our algorithm is efficient and effective to voxelize 3D polygon mesh models into voxel representation, which makes it possible to be employed in robotics and current CAD systems for true solid modeling with particular interior attributes, such as colors, density and materials, etc.