An improved Marching Cube algorithm for 3D data segmentation

The marching cube algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms for isosurface triangulation. It is based on a division of the data volume into elementary cubes, followed by a standard triangulation inside each cube. In the original formulation, the marching cube algorithm is based on 15 basic triangulations and a total of 256 elementary triangulations are obtained from the basic ones by rotation, reflection, conjugation, and combinations of these operations. The original formulation of the algorithm suffers from well-known problems of connectivity among triangles of adjacent cubes, which has been solved in various ways. We developed a variant of the marching cube algorithm that makes use of 21 basic triangulations. Triangles of adjacent cubes are always well connected in this approach. The output of the code is a triangulated model of the isosurface in raw format or in VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language) format.