A marching voxels method for surface rendering of volume data

The marching cubes method is a well-known surface extraction method by using the surface configurations of cubes for surface rendering of volume data. The marching cubes method has three main disadvantages: it is time consuming, ambiguous, and holes are generated. All these disadvantages come from the use of the surface configurations of cubes. We propose an efficient surface extraction method, the marching voxels method, for surface rendering of volume data. Instead of using the surface configurations of cubes, the marching voxels method first generates triangles for inner voxels. Then it combines the triangles of inner voxels to produce the surface of an object. Finally, the surface of an object is projected to a plane to form the final image. Since the marching voxels method considers the combination of triangles of voxels not cubes and the combination of triangles is performed in a deterministic way, there is neither ambiguous case of a combination nor holes for the generated surface. The experimental results show that the marching voxels method saves about 30% of the surface rendering time compared to the marching cubes method for test samples