The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Jun. 13, 2000
Filed:
Jul. 24, 1997
Renben Shu, Singapore, SG;
Yih Lee, Singapore, SG;
Abstract
A computationally time and space efficient data structure and method and system for using the same for surface rendering. The basis for the new data structure lies in organizing a volume data set for surface rendering into a new format where the cells needed for the surface rendering can be searched and displayed more efficiently. Given a threshold t specified by the user, the present data structure is able to efficiently identify all surface cells saving valuable processing time by providing three unique beneficial characteristics. First, given a threshold t, it can directly provide all S-cells without having to check most of the 1-cells and 0-cells such that no time is wasted on visiting the intermediate nodes. Second, it facilitates significant savings in memory space where the data structure only requires N.sup.3 pointers for data storage saving memory space for all intermediate nodes, i.e. O(N.sup.3) pairs of (Min, Max). And third, it makes viable a searching algorithm which can have parallelization capabilities for finding all S-cells such that the algorithm can be efficiently used in today's workstation employing more than one processor.