A Legendre orthogonal moment based 3D edge operator

This paper presents a new 3D edge operator based on Legendre orthogonal moments. This operator can be used to extract the edge of 3D object in any window size, with more accurate surface orientation and more precise surface location. It also has full geometry meaning. Process of calculation is considered in the moment based method. We can greatly speed up the computation by calculating out the masks in advance. We integrate this operator into our rendering of medical image data based on ray casting algorithm. Experimental results show that it is an effective 3D edge operator that is more accurate in position and orientation.