Fast Extraction of High-quality Crease Surfaces for Visual Analysis

Abstract

We present a novel algorithm for the efficient extraction and visualization of high-quality ridge and valley surfaces from numerical datasets. Despite their rapidly increasing popularity in visualization, these so-called crease surfaces remain challenging to compute owing to their strongly nonlinear and non-orientable nature, and their complex boundaries. In this context, existing meshing techniques require an extremely dense sampling that is computationally prohibitive. Our proposed solution intertwines sampling and meshing steps to yield an accurate approximation of the underlying surfaces while ensuring the geometric quality of the resulting mesh. Using the computation power of the GPU, we propose a fast, parallel method for sampling. Additionally, we present a new front propagation meshing strategy that leverages CPU multiprocessing. Results are shown for synthetic, medical and fluid dynamics datasets.