Volumetric data exploration using interval volume

A new type of geometric model called Interval volume for volumetric data exploration is presented. An interval volume represents a three-dimensional subvolume for which the associate scalar values lie within a user-specified interval, and provides one of the promising approaches to solid fitting, which is an extended concept of traditional surface fitting. A well known isosurfacing algorithm called Marching Cubes is extended to obtain a solid fitting algorithm, which extracts from a given volumetric data set a high resolution, polyhedral solid data structure of an interval volume. Branch-on-Need Octree is used as an auxiliary data structure to accelerate the extraction process. A variety of interval volume rendering methods and principal related operations, including measurements and focusing, are also presented. The effectiveness of measurement-coupled visualization capabilities of the presented approach is demonstrated by application to visualizing a four-dimensional simulated data from atomic collision research.