A marching cube algorithm based on edge growth

Abstract

The marching cube algorithm is currently one of the most popular three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction surface rendering algorithms. It forms cube voxels based on an input image and then uses 15 basic topological configurations to extract isosurfaces from the voxels. The algorithm processes each cube voxel in a traversal-based manner, but it does not consider the relationship between the isosurfaces in adjacent cubes. Owing to ambiguity, the final reconstructed model may have holes. In this paper, we propose a marching cube algorithm based on edge growth. The algorithm first extracts seed triangles, grows these seed triangles, and then reconstructs the entire 3D model. According to the position of the growth edge, we propose 17 topological configurations with isosurfaces. The reconstruction results showed that the algorithm can reconstruct the 3D model well. When only the main contour of the 3D model is required, the algorithm performs well. In addition, when there are multiple scattered parts in the data, the algorithm can extract only the 3D contours of the parts connected to the seed by setting the region selected based on the seed.

Keywords

• 3D reconstruction
• Marching cube
• Edge growth