This work presents a method for extracting multiresolution adaptive
polygonal meshes, from volumetric objects. Main aplications of this work
are related to medical area, fluid dynamics, geosciences, metheorology and
others. In these areas data may be represented as volumetric objects.
Volumetric datasets are implicit representations of objects, so it´s very
dicult to apply directly any process to these objects. Mesh extraction
obtains an explicit representation of the objetc, such that it’s easier to
process directly the objects.
The presented method extracts the mesh from two main processes:
Simplification and Refinement. The simplification step extracts a
supersampled representation of the object (in the same volume resolution),
and simplifies it in such a way to obtain a base mesh (or coarse mesh), in a
low resolution, but containing the correct topology of the object. Refinement
step uses the distance transform to obtain a multiresolution representation
of the mesh, it means that at each instant it’s obtained an adaptive higher
resolution mesh. The final mesh presents a set of important properties, like
good triangle aspect ratio, convergency to the object surface, may be applied
as to objects with boundary and as to objects with multiple connected
components, among others properties.