Interactive Shape Preserving Filtering and Visualization of Volumetric Data

This paper presents a method for combined interactive filtering and visualization of volumetric data. The user can set the filter parameters of a shape preserving class of morphological filters, called connected filters, efficiently. The filters work by computing some attribute describing the shape or size for each connected component, and then deciding which to keep based on some threshold. We use a method in which the computation of attributes and connected component analysis is separated from the decision stage of the filtering process. After performing the first stage as initialization, we can perform the (much faster) decision stage many times with different threshold values, allowing interactive filtering and visualization of the results. The results indicate that filtering can be performed at about 5 frames per second on a 256 data set using a Pentium 4 at 1.9 GHz.