Polygonizing extremal surfaces with manifold guarantees

Extremal surfaces are a class of implicit surfaces that have been found useful in a variety of geometry reconstruction applications. Compared to iso-surfaces, extremal surfaces are particularly challenging to construct in part due to the presence of boundaries and the lack of a consistent orientation. We present a novel, grid-based algorithm for constructing polygonal approximations of extremal surfaces that may be open or unorientable. The algorithm is simple to implement and applicable to both uniform and adaptive grid structures. More importantly, the resulting discrete surface preserves the structural property of the extremal surface in a grid-independent manner. The algorithm is applied to extract ridge surfaces from intensity volumes and reconstruct surfaces from point sets with unoriented normals.