Surface extraction from multi-material CT data

This paper describes a method for extracting surfaces from multi-material CT (computed tomography) data. Most contouring methods such as marching cubes algorithm assume that CT data are composed of only two materials. Some extended methods can extract surfaces from the multi-material (non-manifold) implicit representation. However, these methods are not directly applicable to CT data which are composed of three or more materials. There are two major problems that arise from fundamentals of CT. The first problem is that we have to use n(n - l)/2 threshold values for CT data contains n materials and select appropriately one threshold value for each boundary area. The second is that we cannot reconstruct only from CT data in which area three or more materials are adjacent each other. In this paper, we propose a method to solve the problems by using image analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the method with application examples construct polygon models from CT data of machine parts.