Surface carving-based automatic volume data reduction
Many fields, such as medicine and biology, are producing an increasingly large volume using high-resolution digital imaging techniques, and this makes effective data analysis and visualization of these volumes more and more difficult. Volume reduction, decreasing the volume size, is one of the promising directions to solve this challenge for interactive volume visualization. In this paper, we present an automatic volume data reduction method called surface carving. It intelligently removes contextual voxels while preserving important features, and finally generates an optimal volume at the desired reduction size/rate. For large volume data sets, a multilevel banded method is introduced to gracefully overcome the memory limit and speed up volume reduction. We compare our technique with traditional cropping and scaling approaches and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method with several volume data sets.
surface carving automatic volume reduction