Recent developments in volume visualization using standard graphics hardware provide an effective and interactive way to understand and interpret the data. Mainly based on 3d texture mapping, these hardware-accelerated visualization systems often use a cell-projection method based on a tetrahedral decomposition of volumes usually sampled as a regular lattice. On the contrary, the method we address in this paper considers the slicing problem as a restricted solution of the marching cubes algorithm [1, 2]. Our solution is thus simple, elegant and fast. The nature of the intersection polygons provides us with the opportunity to retain only 4 of the 15 canonical configurations defined by Lorensen and Cline and to propose a special look-up table.
A. Benassarou, Eric Bittar, N. W. John, Laurent Lu