1. Marching Cubes: A High Resolution 3D Surface Construction Algorithm
William E. Lorensen & Harvey E. Cline
International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (1987)
Presented by
Chris Covington

2. Overview What are “Marching Cubes” anyway? Medical data acquisition
Previous visualization methods
Explanation of the algorithm
Post-paper work

3. So, what are Marching Cubes?
Marching Cubes is an algorithm which “creates triangle models of constant density surfaces from 3D medical data.”

4. Ok…but what does that mean?
Medical Data
+ Marching Cubes
= Pretty Pictures
= Visualization

5. Visualization Process
Medical Data Acquisition
Image Processing
Surface Construction
Display

6. Medical Data Acquisition
Computed Tomography (CT)
Magnetic Resonance (MR)
Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT)
Each scanning process results in two dimensional “slices” of data.

7. Image Processing
Data Filtering
Structure Recognition

8. Surface Construction
Construction/Reconstruction of scanned surfaces or objects.
Problem of interpreting/interpolating 2D data into 3D visuals.
Marching Cubes provides a new method of creating 3D surfaces.

9. Display Surface Rendering Ray Tracing/Casting Depth Shading
Color Shading

10. Previous Surface Construction Work
Contour Connections (Keppel, 1975)
Cuberilles/Voxels (Herman, 1983)
Ray Casting (Farrell, 1983 / Hohne, 1986)
Density Volumes (Robb, 1983)

11. Problems With Previous Methods
Discard some of the scanning data.
Interpolation and approximation introduce artifacts in the rendered images.
Low resolution.
May require user intervention for best results.

12. Marching Cubes Explained
High resolution surface construction algorithm.
Extracts surfaces from adjacent pairs of data slices using cubes.
Cubes “march” through the pair of slices until the entire surface of both slices has been examined.

13. Marching Cubes Overview
Load slices.
Create a cube from pixels on adjacent slices.
Find vertices on the surfaces.
Determine the intersection edges.
Interpolate the edge intersections.
Calculate vertex normals.
Output triangles and normals.

14. How Are Cubes Constructed
Uses identical squares of four pixels connected between adjacent slices.
Each cube vertex is examined to see if it lies on or off of the surface.

15. How Are The Cubes Used
Pixels on the slice surfaces determine 3D surfaces.
256 surface permutations, but only 14 unique patterns.
A normal is calculated for each triangle vertex for rendering.

16. Triangle Creation Determine triangles contained by a cube.
Determine which cube edges are intersected.
Interpolate intersection point using pixel density.
Calculate unit normals for each triangle vertex using the gradient vector.

17. Grid Resolution
Variations can increase/decrease surface density.

18. Improvements Over Other Methods
Utilizes pixel, line and slice coherency to minimize the number of calculations.
Can provide solid modeling.
Can use conventional rendering techniques and hardware.
No user interaction necessary.
Enables selective displays.
Can be used with other density values.

19. Examples

20. Problems
Original algorithm has ambiguous cases for complementary cubes (left image). Later work (right image) introduces additional complementary cases to resolve this problem.

21. Post-Paper Work Dual Marching Cubes (Nielson, 2004)
Geometrically Deformed Models (Miller, 1991)
Near Optimal IsoSurface Extraction (Livnat, 1996)
Surface Decimation (several)

22. Conclusion
Marching Cubes provides a simple algorithm to translate a series of 2D medical scans into 3D objects.

23. Additional Resources
“The Marching Cubes”, Polytech’Nice-Sophia, (
Nielson, G. “Dual Marching Cubes” IEEE Visualization, Proceedings of the Conference on Visualization ’04.
Shekar, R., et al. “Octree-based Decimation of Marching Cubes Surfaces” IEEE Visualization, Proceedings of the 7th Conference on Visualization ’96.
Matveyev, S. “Approximation of Isosurface in the Marching Cube: Ambiguity Problem”. IEEE Visualization, Proceedings of the Conference on Visualization ’94.
Fuchs, H., M. Levoy, and S. Pizer. “Interactive Visualization of 3D Medical Data” Computer, Vol

24. Additional Resources (cont.)
Miller, J., et al. “Geometrically Deformed Models” Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.
Livnat, Y., Han-Wei Shen, and C. Johnson. “A Near Optimal Isosurface Extraction Algorithm Using the Span Space” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol. 2-1.