Topology Preserving Surface Extraction Using Adaptive Subdivision

Abstract

We address the problem of computing a topology preserving isosurface from a volumetric grid using Marching Cubes for geometry processing applications. We present a novel topology preserving subdivision algorithm to generate an adaptive volumetric grid. Our algorithm ensures that every grid cell satisfies two local geometric criteria: a complex cell criterion and a star-shaped criterion. We show that these two criteria are sufficient to ensure that the surface extracted from the grid using Marching Cubes has the same genus and connectedness as that of the exact isosurface. We use our subdivision algorithm for accurate boundary evaluation of CSG combinations of polyhedra and low degree algebraic primitives, translational motion planning, model simplification and remeshing. The running time of our algorithm varies between a few seconds for simple models composed of a few thousand triangles to tens of seconds for complex polyhedral models represented using hundreds of thousands of triangles.