Parallel decimation of 3D meshes for efficient web-based isosurface extraction

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the parallel decimation of 3d meshes for efficient web-based isosurface extraction. Isosurface extraction is a basic operation that permits to implement many type of queries on volumetric data. The result of a query for a particular isovalue is a triangulated irregular network (TIN) that may contain huge number of points and of triangles, depending on the size of the original data set. In distributed environment, due to the limits of bandwidth availability and/or to the characteristics of the client, it may be necessary to visualize the result of the query with lower resolution. The simplification process is costly, especially for huge data sets. The problem of efficiently parallelize this process is discussed using a cluster of COTS (commercial, off-the-shelf) PCs for a Web-based parallel isosurface extraction system. The advantages of this approach are due to the minimization of the communications number and size between processes and the reduction of the sequential part of the algorithm.