A 3D Surface Tracking Algorithm

摘要

This paper presents a 3D surface tracking algorithm which converts volumetric edge data to a surface model. Existing 3D model generation methods either threshold intensity data, which is sensitive to nonuniform illumination, or trace a surface from multiple layers of edge voxels, where a time-consuming heuristic search is used to extract boundaries. The huge search space prevents using it in 3D. Our algorithm directly constructs a surface model from edge voxels. A voxel is identified as being on the surface if its second derivative is negative and changes sign for neighbors in the gradient direction. By this definition, there can only exist one layer of surface voxels, and the tracking algorithm is simply a breadth-first search. Moreover, the definition of surface voxels is not sensitive to gradient directions, thus this approach is robust against noise. The test results on real data are also reported.