Speeding Up the 3D Surface Generator VESTA

Abstract: The very recent volume-enclosing surface extraction algorithm, VESTA, is revisited. VESTA is used to determine implicit surfaces that are potentially contained in 3D data sets, such as 3D image data and/or 3D simulation data. VESTA surfaces are non-degenerate, i.e., they always enclose a volume that is larger than zero and they never self-intersect, prior to a further processing, e.g., towards isosurfaces. In addition to its ability to deal with local cell ambiguities consistently - and thereby avoiding the accidental generation of holes in the final surfaces - the information of the interior and/or exterior of enclosed 3D volumes is propagated correctly to each of the final surface tiles. Particular emphasis is put here on the speed up of the original formulation of VESTA, while applying the algorithm to 2x2x2 voxel neighborhoods.