Skeleton-Based Surface Reconstruction for Visualizing Plant Roots

In this paper, we present a skeleton-based triangular surface reconstruction method for visualizing plant roots. The proposed method models plant roots as generalized cylinders. A generalized cylinder is constructed by sweeping a two-dimensional cross section along an axis in three-dimensional space. In order to efficiently construct a generalized cylinder, all the cross sections are first generated and sampled in the xy plane, and then they are rotated and translated into three-dimensional space. This technique also simplifies triangular surface construction. The computational advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated by experimental results.