Intersection Free and Topologically Faithful Slicing of Implicit Solid

Abstract

We present a robust and efficient approach to directly slicing implicit solids. Different from prior slicing techniques that reconstruct contours on the slicing plane by tracing the topology of intersected line segments, which is actually not robust, we generate contours by a topology guaranteed contour extraction on binary images sampled from given solids and a subsequent contour simplification algorithm which has the topology preserved and the geometric error controlled. The resultant contours are free of selfintersection, topologically faithful to the given rregular solids and with shape error bounded. Therefore, correct objects can be fabricated from them by rapid prototyping. Moreover, since we do not need to generate the tessellated Brep of given solids, the memory cost our approach is low—only the binary image and the finest contours on one particular slicing plane need to be stored incore. Our method is general and can be applied to any implicit representations of solids.