Real-time exploration of regular volume data by adaptive reconstruction of isosurfaces

We propose an adaptive approach for the fast reconstruction of isosurfaces from regular volume data at arbitrary levels of detail. The algorithm has been designed to enable real-time navigation through complex structures while providing user-adjustable resolution levels. Since adaptive on the-fly reconstruction and rendering is performed from a hierarchical octree representation of the volume data, the method does not depend on preprocessing with respect to a specific isovalue, thus the user can browse interactively through the set of all possible isosurfaces. Special attention is paid to the fixing of cracks in the surface where the adaptive reconstruction level changes and to the efficient estimation of the isosurface's curvature.