Two Methods for Iso-Surface Extraction from Volumetric Data and Their Comparison

Abstract: There are various methods for extracting iso-surfaces from volumetric data. Marching cubes or tetrahedra or raytracing methods are mostly used. There are many specific techniques to increase speed of computation and decrease memory requirements. Although a precision of iso-surface extraction is very important, too, it is not mentioned usually. A comparison of the selected methods was made in different aspects: iso-surface extraction process time, number of triangles generated and estimation of radius, area and volume errors based on approximation of a sphere. Surprisingly, experiments proved that there is no direct relation between precision of extracted and human perception of the extracted iso-surface