A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE

THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET

D. Ayala, E. Verg´es and I. Cruz

Department de Llenguatges i Sistemes Inform`atics, Universitat Polit`ecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Keywords:

Binary Volume Models, Orthogonal Pseudo-polyhedra, Euler Characteristic, Genus.

Abstract:

Topological characteristics are fundamental in many areas. In this paper wepresent a method that computes the

Euler characteristic and the genus of a volume dataset. The followed approach, based on the analogy between

binary volume datasets and orthogonal pseudo-polyhedra (OPP), computes the mentioned values using two

models that are suitable for representing OPP: the Extreme Vertices Model (EVM) and the Ordered Union of

Disjoint Boxes (OUDB). We show the results of these methods for phantom models as well as real datasets,

and compare the efﬁciency of the presented methods with those based on the classic voxel model.

1 INTRODUCTION

The measurement of the topological characteristics of

an object such as its number of connected components

and cavities or its genus is a useful tool in many ap-

plications as image analysis. These attributes can be

computed as a way to detect the relevant features of a

model. Alternatively, they can be used to prove that

homotopy is preserved in several kinds of processes,

as skeletonization or simpliﬁcation. In the Bio-CAD

ﬁeld, the genus is related to the connectivity which is

used to measure the strength of bones (osteoporosis)

or the quality of biomaterials designed to repair them.

In this paper we present a method for computing

the Euler characteristic (EC) and the genus of a bi-

nary volume dataset. The presented approach con-

siders, ﬁrst, the non-manifold orthogonal polyhedron

(OP) analog to the binary volume model and, then,

a manifold OP homotopic to the non-manifold one.

After that, the classic method that computes the EC

for polyhedra is applied to the special case of OP. Fi-

nally, the genus is obtained from the EC and the shells

of the model obtained with the application of a con-

nected component labeling (CCL) process. OP are

represented with two alternative models, the Extreme

Vertices Model (EVM) and the Ordered Union of Dis-

joint Boxes (OUDB). EVM is a very concise B-Rep

model for OP while OUDB is a decomposition model.

In this paper, we contrast the results and per-

formance of the presented methods with those that

compute the same parameters using the voxel model.

We use several phantom models and real datasets

for these tests. The main contributions are the

following. First, the implementation of a method

that computes the connectivity for binary datasets as

well as for OP (without voxelizing them), which is

faster than using the reference voxel method. Sec-

ond, it also extends the functionality of the EVM and

OUDB models, which are useful for many operations

such as Boolean, morphological, CCL, or visualiza-

tion (Aguilera, 1998; Rodr´ıguez and Ayala, 2003).

The paper is arranged as follows. Next section re-

views related work. Section 3 introduces the EVM

and OUDB models. Section 4 presents the connectiv-

ity computation method and Section 5 discusses the

achieved results. Finally Section 6 concludes this pa-

per and points out future work lines.

2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED

WORK

2.1 Binary Volume Models and

Orthogonal Polyhedra

A binary volume model is a union of voxels with as-

sociated values restricted to 0 for background voxels

and 1 for foreground voxels. In them, three kinds of

adjacency relations are deﬁned between voxels: 6, 18

and 26-adjacency. Two voxels are 6-adjacent if they

share a face, 18-adjacent if they share an edge or a

face, and 26-adjacent if they share at least a vertex.

Ayala D., Vergés E. and Cruz I..

A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET.

DOI: 10.5220/0003821400380047

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (GRAPP-2012), pages 38-47

ISBN: 978-989-8565-02-0

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

An adjacency pair (m, n) deﬁnes the adjacency ap-

plied to a binary volume dataset, meaning that fore-

ground voxels are m-adjacent and background vox-

els are n-adjacent (Kong and Rosenfeld, 1989). Us-

ing the same adjacency relations for foreground and

background voxels results in paradoxes that can be

avoided by restricting these pairs to (6, 26) and (26,

6) (Kong and Rosenfeld, 1989; Lachaud and Montan-

vert, 2000).

Latecki (Latecki, 1997) deﬁnes the term of well-

composed. A binary volume model is well-composed

if the conﬁgurations shown in Figure 1 (left and mid-

dle), modulo reﬂections and rotations, are avoided.

He also relates the concepts of well-composedness

with manifoldness. Figure 1 (right) shows the non-

manifold conﬁguration for 2D images.

However, (6, 26) and (26, 6) binary volume mod-

els are non-manifold as 26-adjacency causes non-

manifold conﬁgurations on its boundary.

Figure 1: Non-manifold 3D (left and middle) and 2D (right)

conﬁgurations.

A polyhedron is a subset of R

that is bounded,

closed, regular and semianalytic (Requicha, 1980). A

2-manifold polyhedron can be informally described

as a collection of planar faces such that each edge

is shared only by two faces and each vertex is the

apex of only one cone of faces (Rossignac and Re-

quicha, 1991). A pseudo-polyhedron is an extension

of the concept of polyhedron with a non-manifold

boundary (Tang and Woo, 1991; Rossignac and Car-

doze, 1999). Informally, a pseudo-polyhedron can

be deﬁned as a polyhedron with non-manifold edges

and vertices. A non-manifold edge is adjacent to

more than two faces and a non-manifold vertex is

the apex of more than one cone of faces (Rossignac

and Requicha, 1991). Pseudo-manifolds are equal to

the closure of its interior and are homogeneously 3-

dimensional (Rossignac and Requicha, 1991).

An orthogonal polyhedron (OP) is a polyhedron

with all of its edges and faces oriented in three or-

thogonal directions. The number of faces converg-

ing at OP vertices can be 3, 4 or 6 (Juan-Arinyo,

1995) and we denote by V3, V4 and V6 these kinds

of vertices (see Figure 2). The deﬁnition of pseudo-

polyhedra restricted to the orthogonal case results in

that a non-manifold edge is adjacent to 4 faces and a

non-manifold vertex is the apex of two cones of faces.

These two cases are those corresponding to the non-

manifold conﬁgurations of Figure 1 (left and middle).

Figure 2: Manifold vertices in orthogonal polyhedra: two

conﬁgurations for V3 and one for V4 and V6.

The approach followed in this paper uses an or-

thogonal pseudo-polyhedroninstead of a voxel model

to represent a binary volume model as a map be-

tween these two representations can be established

(Khachan et al., 2000). Moreover, as our goal is to

compute the Euler characteristic and the genus us-

ing an expression suitable for manifold polyhedra,

we will convert the orthogonal pseudo-polyhedron

into a manifold one. The basic method to do this

consists in duplicating non-manifold edges and ver-

tices (Floriani et al., 2003). The matchmaker method

(Rossignac and Cardoze, 1999) decomposes a non-

manifold polyhedron into manifold parts by replicat-

ing and bending the non-manifold edges and, then,

replicating and moving slightly apart the remaining

non-manifold vertices. This method minimizes the

number of duplications. Operations of cutting and

stitching (Gu`eziec et al., 2001) are applied to polyg-

onal surfaces to remove non-manifold edges and ver-

tices, for compression purposes. Non-manifold de-

composition has also been extended to general d-

dimensional simplicial complexes (Floriani et al.,

2003). The authors obtain manifold parts for d ≤ 2

and pseudomanifolds parts that require a further de-

composition for d ≥ 3. In (Attene et al., 2009) the

authors justify that tetrahedra models not only have to

be well-shaped but also manifold models in order to

implement efﬁcient methods for Boolean operations

or model simpliﬁcation. They present an approach for

volume tetrahedral models based on operations that

repair locally ﬁrst singular edges and then singular

vertices.

2.2 Euler Characteristic and Genus

The Euler characteristic, χ, of a binary volume model

can be expressed in terms of the Betti numbers

(Massey, 1991):

χ = β

− β

+ β

(1)

A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET

being the ith Betti number. β

and β

are asso-

ciated to the number of connected components and

cavities while β

is the connectivity which is related

to the genus. χ can be computed from a voxel model

with the following expression (Odgaard and Gunder-

sen, 1993):

χ = n

− n

+ n

− n

(2)

, n

and n

standing respectively for the num-

ber of vertices, edges, faces and voxels. β

and β

are

usually computed using a CCL algorithm and χ and

the connectivity β

with expressions 2 and 1, respec-

tively. Toriwaki et al. present two different strategies

to compute expression 2 and allow several adjacency

pairs (Toriwaki and Yonekura, 2002).

Moreover, in the solid modeling area, χ can be

computed from a polyhedron with the following ex-

pression (Mantyla, 1988):

χ = V − E + F − R = 2(S− g) (3)

V,E, F and R being the number of vertices, edges,

faces and internal rings of faces, respectively, of a

polyhedron. S is the number of shells (number of sets

of connected faces) and g is the genus.

For the special case of triangulated surfaces, χ can

be expressed as:

χ = V − E + T (4)

V, E and T being the number of vertices, edges and

triangles of the mesh.

A triangle mesh can be extracted from a voxel

model to approximate a given isosurface separating

interior and exterior voxels. This mesh can be ob-

tained with the Marching Cubes algorithm (Lorensen

and Cline, 1987) or one of its derived methods that

try to solve the ﬂaws of cracks and ambiguities of the

initial proposal (Bourke, 1994).

Expression 4 is combined with Expression 1 to

compute the connectivity of a triangular isosurface

corresponding to the Laplacian of the electron density

ﬁeld of adenine (Konkle et al., 2003). In this case, β

and β

are computed with a CCL method applied to

triangular surfaces. An incremental method is used to

compute the Betti numbers for any dimension as well

as for α-shapes (Delﬁnado and Edelsbrunner, 1993).

The Euler characteristic and genus are used to de-

termine if two objects have the same topology. In-

formally, two objects are homotopic, i.e., have the

same topology, if they have the same number of con-

nected components, tunnels and cavities (Kong and

Rosenfeld, 1989). Homotopy is a desirable property

in many methods and applications such as thinning.

The concepts of simple voxel and simple deforma-

tions are also used to deﬁne topology preservation for

skeletonization and to devise the corresponding thin-

ning methods, based on the deletion of simple vox-

els (Rosenfeld et al., 1998; Bertrand and Malandain,

1994; Borgefors et al., 1999). In isosurface extrac-

tion, topology-preservation is sometimes a desirable

property that can be evaluated by computing the Eu-

ler characteristic (Schaefer et al., 2007). Sarioz

et al. (Sarioz et al., 2004) compute the Betti num-

bers β

, β

and β

with a fast incremental approach.

They use these triples, computed for the binary vol-

umes obtained from every possible threshold value of

a gray-scale 3D image, to classify a large collection

of datasets.

In the Bio-CAD ﬁeld, the connectivity is related to

biomechanical properties and is used to measure the

strength of bone or other materials. The method based

on expressions 1 and 2 is used to evaluate the osteo-

porosis degree of mice femur (Mart´ın-Badosa et al.,

2003) or human vertebrae (Odgaard and Gundersen,

1993) or to evaluate hydraulic properties of sintered

glass (Vogel et al., 2005).

There are methods that compute the connectivity

from a curve skeleton previouslycomputed. Pothuaud

et al. (Pothuaud et al., 2002; Pothuaud et al., 2004)

apply a 3D-line skeleton graph analysis (3D-LSGA)

to MR images of human vertebrae. The number of

loops of this graph is related to β

. Moreover, there

is a relationship between the coordination number of

this graph (average number of edges in a vertex) and

the connectivity (Ioannidis and Chatzis, 2000). Some

other approaches are based on the computation of a

surface skeleton. A plate/rod model is derived, based

on the surface/linear regions of the surface skeleton

(Stauber and M¨uller, 2006; Peyrin et al., 2007) and

the connectivity is measured as the relative amount of

plate and rod elements.

2.3 Alternative Models

Binary volume models are mostly represented with

the classic voxel model. However, in the volume anal-

ysis and visualization ﬁeld, several alternative models

have been devised for speciﬁc purposes.

Hierarchical decomposition models as octrees

and kd-trees have been used for Boolean operations

(Samet, 1990), CCL (Dillencourt et al., 1992), thin-

ning (Quadros et al., 2004) and also to extract and

simplify isosurfaces (And´ujar et al., 2002; Vander-

hyde and Szymczak, 2008; Greβ and Klein, 2004).

Other models aim to store only surface voxels to

gain storage and computational efﬁciency. The semi-

boundary representation allows direct access to sur-

face voxels and performs fast visualization and ma-

nipulation operations (Grevera et al., 2000). There

GRAPP 2012 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications

are methods for morphological operations and CCL

that use this representation (Thurfjell et al., 1995).

The slice-based binary shell representation also stores

only surface voxels and is applied to render binary

volumes (Kim et al., 2001).

3 EVM AND OUDB

REPRESENTATIONS

In this work, the Euler characteristic and the genus are

computed using two alternative representations. This

section introduces the EVM and OUDB models. For

a deeper study of these models and their properties,

see (Aguilera, 1998) and (Rodr´ıguez et al., 2004).

The Extreme Vertices Model (EVM) is an implicit

B-Rep model for orthogonal pseudo-polyhedra that

stores only a subset of its vertices, named extreme

vertices (EV). These vertices are the ending vertices

of maximal uninterrupted segments (see Figure 3)

which are stored lexicographically.

C4C5 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5

C1 C6C3C2

A B

Figure 3: Above, left: an orthogonal pseudo-polyhedron

with 38 marked extreme vertices and 6 cuts. Above, right:

its sequence of 5 prisms with the representative section (X

direction). Below: Its XY OUDB representation. Note that

EVM only stores the extreme vertices A and B in the cor-

responding marked line AB, that also crosses three more

internal vertices (two V4 and one V6 that are not stored in

the EVM).

A cut, C

, is the set of extreme vertices lying on

the same orthogonal plane (see Figure 3, above, left).

An orthogonal polyhedron can also be seen as a se-

quence of orthogonal prisms represented by its sec-

tion, S

(see Figure 3, above, right). Cuts and sections

are orthogonal polygons embedded in 3D space. For

each main direction, sections can be computed from

cuts and cuts from sections with the two following ex-

pressions: S

= S

i−1

⊗C

, S

0 and C

= S

i−1

⊗ S

i = 1..n. The symbol ⊗ stands for the XOR Boolean

operation.

These operations are actually performed on the

projections of cuts and sections onto the main plane

parallel to them. So, from now on, we denote as C

and S

the projection of the ith cut and the ith section

respectively onto the main plane parallel to them.

Moreover, there is a property concerning orthog-

onal polygons and polyhedra represented with EVM

that states that the XOR Boolean operation is reduced

to the application of an XOR at the vertices’ level

(0-D XOR). EVM(A ⊗ B) = EVM(A) ⊗ EVM(B).

Therefore the computation of sections from cuts and

cuts from sections is a simple XOR of its vertices.

The Ordered Union of Disjoint Boxes (OUDB) is

a decomposition model that is derived from EVM by

splitting the aforementioned orthogonal prisms into

boxes (see Figure 3, below). OUDB is axis-aligned as

octrees and bintrees but the partition is done along the

object geometry like the BSP model. In the presented

approach, to compute the genus, we will use a CCL

method developed for the OUDB model (Rodr´ıguez

and Ayala, 2003).

The improved performance achieved with these

alternative representations relies on the fact that the

corresponding algorithms are basically traversals of

extreme vertices or boxes instead of traversals of vox-

els and that, in most cases, the number of extreme ver-

tices and boxes is substantially smaller than the num-

ber of foreground voxels.

Many operations have been developed for these

models and some of them are used in the pre-

sented approach as morphological erosion and dila-

tion (Rodr´ıguez and Ayala, 2003). These operations

are recursive in the dimension and are actually per-

formed on the 1D sections of the 2D sections of the

aforementioned prisms.

4 COMPUTATION OF THE

EULER CHARACTERISTIC

AND GENUS

The approach followed in this paper to compute the

Euler characteristic and the genus is based on expres-

sion 3, suitable for manifold polyhedra. As the con-

tinuous analog of a (26, 6) or (6, 26) binary volume

model is an orthogonal pseudo-polyhedron, we will

convert it into a manifold one with an offset opera-

tion.

A positive offset is deﬁned as (Rossignac and Re-

quicha, 1986):

′

= P⊕ d = {p | ∃q ∈ P,dist(p,q) ≤ d} (5)

A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET

dist can be computed in several metrics. In this

paper, we use the chessboard metric, L

∞

, to guaran-

tee the closure of orthogonal polyhedra under offset

operations.

A negative offset is deﬁned as the complement of

the expanded complement. Positive and negative off-

sets are related respectively to dilation and erosion

(Gonzalez and Woods, 1992) and to Minkowski sum

and decomposition (Ghosh and Haralick, 1996).

Then, our method is supported by the following

proposition:

Proposition 1 Let P be an orthogonal pseudo-

polyhedron that is the continuous analog of a (26, 6)

binary volume model and let P

′

be the positive offset

of P with distance d < 0.5s, P

′

= P ⊕ d, and s be-

ing the voxel’s size of the underlying binary volume

model. Then, the two following properties hold:

• P and P

′

are homotopy-equivalent

• P

′

is a 2-manifold

This proposition is now demonstrated informally.

With the positive offset, we duplicate all the non-

manifold edges and vertices topologically as well as

geometrically and this is the basic process to con-

vert a non-manifold to a manifold. However, a non-

restricted positive offset could result in new connec-

tions or disconnections of the boundary of P and,

therefore, the resulting offset would have a differ-

ent number of connected components, cavities or

tunnels than the original object. Even worse, new

non-manifold elements could appear in other regions.

Both problems are avoided if the offset distance is less

than half the size of the voxel of the underlying binary

volume model.

An analogous proposition can be stated for (6, 26)

binary volume models, in which case a negative offset

is applied.

Figure 4 (above) shows the result of applying a

positive offset to two orthogonal pseudo-polyhedra

that include the two possible non-manifold conﬁgura-

tions (edge and vertex). Figure 4 (below) is analogous

for a negative offset.

Figure 5 shows a 2D example with an orthogonal

polygon and the underlying binary model. The initial

polygon (in brown) has 2 connected components and

1 hole. Above, we apply a positive offset with d =

0.5s and the resulting polygon has only one connected

component and no holes. Moreover, with this offset

a non-manifold vertex has disappeared but a new one

has been created. With d < 0.5s (below) the resulting

polygon is homotopy-equivalentto the initial one, the

non-manifold vertex has been removed and no new

non-manifold vertices have appeared.

The proposed method uses alternatively the

EVM and OUDB representations of the polyhedron

Figure 4: Positive (above) and negative (below) offsets

applied to the non-manifold conﬁgurations of orthogonal

pseudo-polyhedra. In brown, the initial polyhedron.

Figure 5: A 2D example showing the result of applying a

positive offset with d ≥ 0.5s (above) and d < 0.5s (below).

(EVM-Rep and OUDB-Rep) that have already

been computed. The whole process consists of the

following steps, that are explained below:

Input: EVM-Rep and OUDB-Rep of the polyhedron

Output: Euler characteristic (χ) and genus (g)

1. Compute the number of connected components

from OUDB-Rep, n1

2. Compute the complement of OUDB-Rep

3. Compute the number of connected components of

the complement minus one, n2

4. Compute the number of shells, S = n1 + n2

5. Apply a positive offset with d < 0.5s to the EVM-

Rep

GRAPP 2012 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications

6. For each cut,C

,i = 1..n, of the dilated EVM-Rep

in each direction X, Y, Z do:

(a) Compute the number of faces, F

, (number of

connected components) from the OUDB-Rep

of C

(b) Compute the number of rings, R

, (number of

connected components of the complement of

the OUDB-Rep of C

, minus one)

and V6

vertices

7. Compute the total number of faces (F), rings (R)

and vertices V4 and V6: F = Σ

i=1

, R = Σ

i=1

V4 = Σ

i=1

and V6 = Σ

i=1

8. V = EV +V4+V6

9. E = (3EV + 4V4+ 6V6)/2

10. χ = V − E + F − R

11. g = S − χ/2

Steps 1, 2 and 3, use a CCL algorithm (Rodr´ıguez

et al., 2004) to compute the number of connected

components (step 1) and the number of cavities (steps

2 and 3). This algorithm follows a classic two-pass

strategy like the algorithms based on voxel models

but it traverses a set of boxes instead of voxels. As

this method can deal with pseudo-manifold polyhe-

dra, it can be applied to the initial object as well as to

the dilated object.

Step 5 applies a positive offset to the EVM-Rep

in order to guarantee that the resulting polyhedron

is a two-manifold. The applied method performs 1-

dimensional offsets consecutively in the three main

directions. The details of the algorithm can be found

in (Rodr´ıguez and Ayala, 2003).

The following steps compute the number of the re-

maining elements in expression 3. We denote by F, E

and R, the number of faces, edges, and internal rings

of faces and by V3, V4, V6 the number of vertices

with 3, 4 and 6 faces converging at them, respectively.

EVM-Rep stores only extreme vertices that, in the

case of manifold polyhedra, coincide with vertices

V3. Therefore,V3 is obtained directly from the EVM-

Rep. To compute F, R, V4 and V6, we perform a

traversal of all the cuts of the EVM-Rep. Every cut is

a 2D orthogonal polygon that is also EVM and OUDB

represented. The faces and rings of a cut (in 2D) play

the same role as the number of connected components

and cavities (in 3D) and so they are computed in the

same way, i.e., by applying the same CCL algorithm.

Therefore, step 6 (a) and (b) are 2D versions of steps

1 to 3.

Step 6 (c) is performed taking into account the

following considerations. Although we are working

with a two-manifold 3D polyhedron, its faces may

present the non-manifold 2D pattern shown in Fig-

ure 1 (right): the two coplanar faces incident to a V4

vertex present this pattern as well as the three pairs

of two coplanar faces of a V6 vertex (see Figure 2).

To compute V4 and V6 we rely on these facts. When

processing each cut, 2D non-manifold vertices are de-

tected and stored in a list together with the number of

times that have been found. V4 vertices are those de-

tected once while V6 are those detected three times.

Detection of 2D non-manifold vertices is per-

formed with EVM-Rep, i.e., with cuts and sections in

1D. When a 1D cut of a polygon contains a vertex of

the previous 1D section, this vertex is non-manifold.

This property is actually evaluated for the projections

of cuts and sections onto the main axis parallel to

them. Figure 6 shows an example of a polygon with

8 cuts and 7 sections. Cut C

contains a vertex of sec-

tion S

(their projection onto theY axis), therefore the

marked vertex is non-manifold.

C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8

S1 S2 S3

S5 S6

Figure 6: 2D example with a non-manifold vertex.

Step 7 indicates that all these elements computed

for each cut are added in order to compute F, R, V4

andV6 for the whole object. Step 8 computesthe total

number of vertices (V) and step 9 the total number of

edges (E) from the number of edges that each class

of vertices has: E = (3V3+ 4V4+ 6V6)/2. Finally,

steps 10 and 11 compute the Euler characteristic and

the genus, respectively, using expression 3.

5 RESULTS

We have measured the χ and genus of several test

datasets by means of three methods: the methods ap-

plied to voxel models and to triangle meshes (see Sec-

tion 2.2) and the method applied to EVM/OUDB that

is presented in this paper (see Section 4). These three

methods produce the same results, and in this section

we compare their execution times.

A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET

(a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

(f) (g) (h) (i) (j)

(k) (l) (m) (n) (o)

(p) (q) (r) (s) (t)

Figure 7: Rendered images of test datasets.

Table 1: For each tested dataset, the size of the voxel model, number and percentage of internal voxels, number of extreme

vertices in the EVM-Rep, ratio between extreme vertices and internal voxels, and number of triangles of the triangle mesh

isosurface extracted with MC.

Name size int. v. % int. v. EV %

intv.

triangles %

triangles

(a) stagbeetle 411x371x247 1737343 4.6 132184 7.6 567972 23.3

(b) aneurysm 213x215x240 69743 0.6 50318 72.1 175064 28.7

(d) brain 200x250x214 4345477 40.6 240584 5.5 1000222 24.1

(e) engine 139x197x108 901818 30.5 101114 11.2 663900 15.2

(f) scaffold 132x132x132 367632 16.0 89568 24.4 492480 18.2

(g) colon 512x512x426 72625607 65.0 1653726 2.3 7862654 21.0

(h) xmas 459x499x480 801013 0.7 241476 30.1 1574984 15.3

(i) ball 100x100x100 357869 35.8 32348 9.0 133640 24.2

(j) rock 331x211x501 4575786 13.1 821012 17.9 6077500 13.5

(k) bunny 452x331x334 2885577 5.8 437938 15.2 2053328 21.3

(l) chest 314x231x240 1249644 7.2 259604 20.8 1211252 21.4

(m) fertility 232x91x177 862965 23.1 47118 5.5 263200 17.9

(n) disk brake 511x512x73 2584762 13.5 153498 5.9 1150196 13.3

(o) neptune 308x512x227 1754321 4.9 116680 6.7 570788 20.4

(p) vase 139x255x139 825336 16.8 101552 12.3 474812 21.4

(q) venus 148x148x512 3214277 28.7 109184 3.4 559354 19.5

(r) atenea 350x195x512 11758227 33.6 179400 1.5 989988 18.1

(s) ramses 347x999x523 45089181 24.9 426330 0.9 2954748 14.4

(t) hand 511x358x175 1262770 3.9 142828 11.3 654412 21.8

GRAPP 2012 - International Conference on Computer Graphics Theory and Applications

Table 2: For each dataset, its number of positive and negative shells, genus and EC and the computation times in seconds for

the methods using the voxel model, the OUDB/EVM-Reps and the triangle mesh.

Name C

−

genus χ Time χ (s) Time Total (s)

MVoxels EVM MVoxels EVM Mesh

(a) stagbeetle 17 114 226 -190 9.9 0.8 37.1 1.6 2.7

(b) aneurysm 406 12 146 544 3.5 0.4 14.4 0.7 0.2

(d) brain 1 542 516 54 3.5 1.4 13.7 3.2 12.1

(e) engine 9 194 130 146 0.6 0.6 2.6 1.3 8.1

(f) scaffold 4 0 256 -504 0.6 0.6 2.1 0.8 1.4

(g) colon 11820 18118 30387 -898 41.2 13.3 178.5 35.1 158.6

(h) xmas 1324 40 171 2386 39.8 1.4 155.2 3.8 4.0

(i) ball 1 0 0 2 2.0 0.1 5.1 0.1 0.4

(j) rock 2502 26 647 3762 10.5 7.1 50.3 31.5 57.0

(k) bunny 1 155 14 284 17.9 2.5 69.2 7.2 16.8

(l) chest 1 106 246 -278 5.7 1.6 23.4 3.7 11.5

(m) fertility 1 0 4 -6 0.7 0.3 3.0 0.5 0.8

(n) disk brake 1 0 11 -20 4.1 0.8 17.6 1.1 7.5

(o) neptune 1 0 4 -6 12.6 1.0 49.8 2.0 2.9

(p) vase 1 0 0 2 1.4 0.6 6.2 1.3 2.5

(q) venus 1 3 4 0 3.4 0.9 13.3 1.8 2.9

(r) atenea 1 30 31 0 9.4 1.4 33.5 2.6 5.0

(s) ramses 1 0 2 -2 56.5 2.2 216.4 4.7 36.3

(t) hand 1 0 5 -8 8.1 1.3 31.7 2.3 2.7

The presented algorithms have been written in C++

and tested on a PC Intel Core 2 CPU E6600 at 2.4

GHz with 3.2 GB and running Linux. All reported

execution times are in seconds.

We have measured the connectivity in a selection

of datasets that encompass a broad range of shape fea-

tures and occupancy ratios. These datasets where ob-

tained from the following public volume repositories:

Aim@Shape, Stanford, S. Roettger, volvis, TU Wien

or own collection.

The volume models are usually provided as

grayscale voxel models that record the density at ev-

ery sampling point in a 3D image. Then, a threshold is

applied to segment the voxels into two groups: back-

ground and foreground voxels.

To obtain a more fair comparison between the

tried methods, the initial voxel models have been re-

duced to match their corresponding minimum bound-

ing box. These resulting datasets present non-

manifold conﬁgurations and still contain many iso-

lated cavities and disconnected components.

Figure 7 shows rendered views of the test datasets.

These datasets present a diverse topology: some have

few components (e.g. fertility (m)) but others have

many parts (e.g. xmas (h) or rock (j)); some have few

tunnels (e.g. bunny(k)) and others many of them (e.g.

scaffold (f)); some contain visible cavities (e.g. colon

(g)) but others do not (e.g. ramses (s)); some present a

simple geometry with few faces (e.g. vase (p)) whilst

others are more intricate (e.g. chest (l)).

We consider that the EVM/OUDB representations

are available and ignore the cost of conversion from

and to a voxel model (which is less than 10 seconds

for most datasets and less than 120 s. for the larger

ones. Similar times appear for the conversion to tri-

angle meshes using Marching Cubes). Nevertheless,

these EVM/OUDB conversion algorithms have also

been published (Aguilera and Ayala, 2001; Rodr´ıguez

et al., 2004).

Table 1 shows the characteristics of the datasets:

the size of the voxel model, the number and percent-

age of internal voxels, the number of extreme ver-

tices of the corresponding EVM-Rep, the ratio be-

tween internal voxels and extreme vertices, the num-

ber of triangles of a triangular surface mesh obtained

via Marching Cubes and the ratio between triangles

and extreme vertices. Note how the equivalent repre-

sentation of a binary model as an EVM usually pro-

vides a large reduction of the number of elements.

Table 2 summarizes the measures of the number of

positive and negativeshells, χ and genus, and the time

needed to compute them using the three referenced

methods, with the best times highlighted.

The time to compute the χ value is negligible

when equation 4 is applied to a triangle mesh, so this

value is not shown in Table 2. Observe that the pro-

posed method is faster than the voxel model reference

method, in some cases up to an order of magnitude.

The difference is smaller if compared with the trian-

gle mesh method: the computation is simpler in that

A POLYHEDRAL APPROACH TO COMPUTE THE GENUS OF A VOLUME DATASET

case but it has to process a larger number of elements,

because a triangle mesh extracted with MC generates

a huge number of small triangles.

Also note how the ramses statue, with a boxy

shape, has a very compact encoding as an EVM-

Rep. On the contrary, the aneurysm dataset produces

a quite large EVM, as its internal volume is small and

has many thin features. In this case, the execution

time for the EVM method is worse. The contrary hap-

pens with the xmas tree, which has a very inefﬁcient

voxel model representation as it is almost empty. In

a nutshell, the proposed method behaves better with

very large and compact (not sparse) datasets, such as

the set of scanned statues.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

In this paper we have presented a method to compute

the Euler characteristic and the genus of a volume

dataset using two alternative models, EVM-Rep and

OUDB-Rep, and we have analyzed their performance

compared to the reference methods applied to voxel

models and triangle meshes.

We have tested several public volume datasets.

We conclude that the connectivity computation in

general is better in the new presented approach with

these test datasets. This improvement is much notice-

able in the complete g computation than in the χ sub-

procedure. The divergence in execution times can be

traced to the size of the datasets but above all to the

intricacy of the represented objects: the method for

voxel models is almost constant time in relation to the

number of voxels, the triangle mesh method mainly

depends on the number of triangles and the proposed

method depends on the number of extreme vertices

of the dataset, with these two latter numbers directly

proportional to the surface tortuosity of the model.

In the biomedical ﬁeld, there are many other struc-

tural parameters worth to be studied as they describe

the properties of a biomaterial. We have already de-

veloped methods (Verg´es et al., 2008) for obtaining a

pore network. We are now studying other structural

parameters such anisotropy.

We also intend to evaluate temporal sequences

and gray-scale datasets representing real samples with

voxel as well as EVM and OUDB models.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partly funded by the CICYT pro-

ject TIN2008-02903 of the Spanish government.

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