Patent Document ID: 8125498
Application ID: 11761418
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer readable medium embodying instructions executable by a processor to perform a method for generating a volumetric mask, the method comprising: providing a closed surface mesh; determining a discrete volume representation of the closed surface mesh; determining a temporary surface mask based on the closed surface mesh and a slice direction chosen from the discrete volume representation to produce a contour of the closed surface mesh for each slice of the discrete volume representation; and filling a surface defined by the contours to generate the volumetric mask, wherein the volumetric mask is output to one of a display and a memory, wherein determining of the temporary surface mask comprises, determining two planes which define each slice and associate a clipping plane to each of the two planes; setting up a rendering in a render texture for enabling the two clipping planes; and drawing the contour of the surface mesh between the two clipping planes, wherein filling the surface defined by the contours to generate the volumetric mask comprises filling using one of a 2D approach and a 3D approach filling directly the contours, wherein the 2D approach comprises: placing a seed in each pixel of the bounding rectangle of each slice; and performing a region growing operation to select an exterior of the contour.