Progressive View-Dependent Isosurface Propagation

This paper proposes a new isosurface extraction algorithm that extracts portions of the isosurface in a view-dependent manner by ray casting and propagation. The algorithm casts rays through a volume to find visible active cells as seeds and then propagates their polygonal isosurface into the neighboring cells. Small pieces of the isosurface are generated by distance-limited propagation and joined together to form the final surface. We demonstrate that this progressive algorithm generates an approximate result quickly and refines it to the final correct image over time. In addition, the algorithm scales with the resolution of the display and supports adaptive-resolution visualization.