Marching cubes has long been employed as a standard indirect volume rendering approach to extract isosurfaces from 3D volumetric data. This talk will present a GPU-friendly MC implementation. Besides the cell indexing, a scheme is proposed to calculate vertex and normal interpolations by precomputing the expensive equations and looking up these values during runtime. Upon a commodity Graphics processing unit (GPU), the implementation can rapidly extract isosurfaces from a high-resolution volume and render the result. With the proposed parallel marching cubes algorithm, layer-structured triangles may be naturally generated, which facilitate the visibility-correct visualization of multiple-layer translucent isosurfaces without performing computational expensive sorting. The algorithm extracts and draws triangles, in a layer by layer fashion, from back to front. With the painter algorithm, the visibility of multi-layer translucent isosurfaces is resolved naturally.

Pheng Ann Heng is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). In 1999, he set up the CUHK Virtual Reality, Visualization and Imaging Research Centre and serves as the centre Director since then. He works on medical imaging, medical visualization, image-based rendering, virtual reality applications in medicine and interactive graphics. His recent work includes GPU accelerated volume rendering, real-time visualization of Chinese Visible Human (CVH) and photorealistic virtual anatomy. His research group has also constructed the world first virtual acupuncture human based on ultra-high resolution CVH data set. He received the "IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award 2005" and "Asia Pacific ICT Award 2005".