Topology Preserving Tetrahedral Decomposition Applied To Trilinear Interval Volume Tetrahedrization

Abstract

We describe a method to decompose a cube with trilinear interpolation into a collection of tetrahedra with linear interpolation, where the isosurface topology is preserved for all isovalues during decomposition. Visualization algorithms that require input scalar data to be defined on a tetrahedral grid can utilize our method to process 3D rectilinear data with topological correctness. As one of many possible examples, we apply the decomposition method to topologically accurate tetrahedral mesh extraction of an interval volume from trilinear volumetric imaging data. The topological correctness of the resulting mesh can be critical for accurate simulation and visualization.