Line Drawings from Volume Data
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), August 2005

Michael Burns, Janek Klawe, Szymon Rusinkiewicz,
Adam Finkelstein, Doug DeCarlo

Two line drawings of isosurfaces extracted directly from a 512 x 512 x 256 voxel grid.
Without hidden surface removal, the left drawing renders at interactive frame rates on a laptop.

Abstract

Renderings of volumetric data have become an important data analysis tool for applications ranging from medicine to scientific simulation. We propose a volumetric drawing system that directly extracts sparse linear features, such as silhouettes and suggestive contours, using a temporally coherent seed-and-traverse framework. In contrast to previous methods based on isosurfaces or nonrefractive transparency, producing these drawings requires examining an asymptotically smaller subset of the data, leading to efficiency on large data sets. In addition, the resulting imagery is often more comprehensible than standard rendering styles, since it focuses attention on important features in the data. We test our algorithms on datasets up to $512^3$, demonstrating interactive extraction and rendering of line drawings in a variety of drawing styles.

Citation (BibTeX)

Michael Burns, Janek Klawe, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Adam Finkelstein, and Doug DeCarlo. Line Drawings from Volume Data. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH) 24(3):512-518, August 2005.

Paper
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Video
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