Voxel-based texture mapping for medical data.

In computerized image and graphic applications, texture mapping is one of the most commonly used methods to improve the realism or to enhance the visual effect of object rendering without too much increase in computational complexity. The conventional method usually has to transfer three-dimensional (3D) object to the polygonal structure, and is computationally expensive. As the medical data are mostly in voxel format, the polygonal structure is not efficient or requires more complicated mechanism in retrieving the internal information of medical data. In this paper, we propose a new texture mapping method, based on flattening a chain-coded 3D surface, to handle the voxel-based data directly. The method flattens the 3D object surface onto a two-dimensional (2D) plane and then uses 2D metamorphosis to generate the correspondences between object surface and texture image. Therefore, polygon transformation is no longer necessary and texture mapping is handled with inexpensive 2D morphing. More importantly, the internal information of medical data can be easily preserved and utilized further. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.