Detection and extraction of boundary surface patches within 3D images
3维图像中边界曲面的分类追踪及抽取

In 3D image analysis, detection and reconstruction of boundary surfaces is a very important problem. Some methods have been developed for extracting or approximately computing continuous implicit boundary surfaces from 3D images. However, they have the drawback of incorrectly classifying some zero-crossing surface patches as boundary surface patches. In this paper, we present a new method to detect and trace boundary surfaces from 3D images. First, all cubes containing boundary surface patches are divided into two categories: cubes containing one connected boundary surface patch, called and first class of edge cubes, and cubes containing two or more disconnected boundary surface patches, called the second class of edge cubes. Then, according to the continuity and the connectivity of the boundary surface, we can track all the edge cubes from both classes. Finally, the boundary surface patches contained in the first class of edge cubes can be extracted directly, and the boundary surface patches contained in the second class of edge cubes are extracted based on the adjacent first class of edge cubes. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is feasible and effective, and can effectively overcome the shortcomings of existing methods.