Abstract

This work is a thorough investigation of the area of visualisation of regular three dimensional data. The main contributions are new methods for: (1) reconstructing surfaces from contour data; (2) constructing voxel data from triangular meshes; (3) real-time manipulation through the use of cut planes; and (4) ultra high quality and accurate rendering. Various other work is presented which reduces the amount of calculations required during volume rendering, reduces the number of cubes that need to be considered during surface tiling and the combined application of particle systems and blobby models with high quality, computationally efficient rendering. All these methods have offered new solutions and improved existing methods for the construction, manipulation and visualisation of volume data. In addition to these new methods this work acts as a review and guide of current state of the art research, and gives in depth details of implementations and results of well known methods. Comparisons are made using these results of both computational expense and image quality, and these serve as a basis for the consideration of what visualisation technique to use for the resources available and the presentation of the data required. Reviews of each main visualisation topic are presented, in particular the review of volume rendering methods covers much of the recent research. Complementing this is the comparison of many alternative viewing models and efficiency tricks in the most thorough investigation to this researcher's knowledge. During the course of this research many existing methods have been implemented efficiently, in particular the surface tiling technique, and a method for measuring the distance between a point and a 3D triangle.

Citation

BibTeX

@phdthesis{MarkWJones1995,
    title    = {The Visualisation of Regular Three Dimensional Data},
    school   = {Univiersity of Wales, University College of Swansea (Swansea University)},
    author   = {Jones, Mark W.},
    year     = {1995},
}