2D-Manifold Boundary Surfaces Extraction from Heterogeneous Object on GPU

The conventional isosurface techniques are not competent for meshing a heterogeneous object because they assume that the object is homogeneous. Thus the visualization method taking the heterogeneity into account is desired. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to extract the boundary surfaces from a heterogeneous object in one pass, whose remarkable advantage is free of the number of materials contained. The heterogeneous object is first classified into a series of homogeneous material components. Then each component is enclosed with a 2D-manifold boundary surface extracted via our algorithm. The information important to the heterogeneous object is also provided, such as the interface between two materials, the intersection curve where three materials meet and the intersection point where four materials meet. To improve the performance, the algorithm is also designed and implemented on GPU. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.