Fast isocontouring for improved interactivity

We present an isocontouring algorithm which is near-optimal for real-time interaction and modification of isovalues in large datasets. A preprocessing step selects a subset S of the cells which are considered as seed cells. Given a particular isovalue, all cells in S which intersect the given isocontour are extracted using a highperformance range search. Each connectedcomponent is swept out using a fast isocontour propagation algorithm. The computational complexity for the repeated action of seed point selection and isocontour propagation is O(log n 0 +k), where n 0 is the size of S and k is the size of the output. In the worst case, n 0 = O(n), where n is the number of cells, while in practical cases, n 0 is smaller than n by one to two orders of magnitude. Keywords: Visualization, Scalar Data, Isocontouring, Range Query 1 INTRODUCTION A wide range of techniques have been developed for the visualization of scalar fields defined by a function F(x) over a given domain D. ...