TY - JOUR T1 - Interactive Visualization of Large Tetrahedral Meshes through Selective Refinement JF - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Y1 - 2003 A1 - Cignoni,P. A1 - De Floriani, Leila A1 - Magillo,P. A1 - Puppo,E. A1 - Scopigno,R. A1 - di Genova,U. AB - In this paper, we address the problem of the efficient visualization of very largeirregular volume datasets. To this aim, we exploit a multiresolution representation based on a domain decomposition into tetrahedral cells. A new compact data struc- ture is described which encodes the whole dataset at a virtually continuous range of different resolutions, with a storage cost six times lower than a standard data struc- ture for tetrahedral meshes. Such structure supports on-line selective refinement to focus resolution on areas that the user considers more critical, based on either field values, or domain location, or opacity of the transfer function. Selective refinement is used to trade-off between resolution and speed in visualization, according to user needs and hardware constraints. These features have been implemented in a new system, called TAn2 (Tetrahedra Analyzer), for the interactive visualization of three- dimensional scalar fields defined on very large tetrahedral meshes. Multiresolution representation and selective refinement make the system fully scalable with respect to the size of the dataset and to hardware requirements. ER -