A scale-elastic discrete grid structure for voxel-based modeling and management of 3D data

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) discrete grid systems have been widely applied to voxel-based modeling and the management of 3D data. In the existing rigid grid structure (RGS), the scales of the RGS-based voxel grid in X/Y/Z dimensions are interrelated. Therefore, the RGS cannot satisfy the anisotropic scale requirements of voxels in different dimensions, rendering RGS-based methods unable to compress the voxel model effectively and manage voxels efficiently. A scale-elastic grid structure (SEGS) was proposed to solve these problems and applied to voxel-based modeling and management. Comparisons with the RGS showed that when the voxel model accuracy remained unchanged, the storage space of the voxel model generated by the SEGS-based method decreased to 12.9% on average, whereas the efficiency of decoding the voxel model increased by 3.34 times on average. The efficiencies of importing, indexing, and querying voxel data by the SEGS-based method increased by 5.27, 6.84, and 3.19 times on average.

Keywords

• Discrete grid system
• Scale-elastic grid structure
• Voxel-based modeling
• Voxel model compression
• Voxel data management