Retailoring Box Splines to Lattices for Highly Isotropic Volume Representations

Abstract

3D box splines are defined by convolving a 1D box function with itself along different directions. In volume visualization, box splines are mainly used as reconstruction kernels that are easy to adapt to various sampling lattices, such as the Cartesian Cubic (CC), Body-Centered Cubic (BCC), and Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) lattices. The usual way of tailoring a box spline to a specific lattice is to span the box spline by exactly those principal directions that span the lattice itself. However, in this case, the preferred directions of the box spline and the lattice are the same, amplifying the anisotropic effects of each other. This leads to an anisotropic volume representation with strongly preferred directions. Therefore, in this paper, we retailor box splines to lattices such that the sets of vectors that span the box spline and the lattice are disjoint sets. As the preferred directions of the box spline and the lattice compensate each other, a more isotropic volume representation can be achieved. We demonstrate this by comparing different combinations of box splines and lattices concerning their anisotropic behavior in tomographic reconstruction and volume visualization.