A complete distance field representation

Abstract

Distance fields are an important volume representation. A high quality distance field facilitates accurate surface characterization and gradient estimation. However, due to Nyquist's law, no existing volumetric methods based on the linear sampling theory can fully capture surface details, such as comers and edges, in 3D space. We propose a novel complete distance field representation (CDFR) that does not rely on Nyquist's sampling theory. To accomplish this, we construct a volume where each voxel has a complete description of all portions of surface that affect the local distance field. For any desired distance, we are able to extract a surface contour in true Euclidean distance, at any level of accuracy, from the same CDFR representation. Such point-based iso-distance contours have faithful per-point gradients and can be interactively visualized using splatting, providing per-point shaded image quality. We also demonstrate applying CDFR to a cutting edge design for manufacturing application involving high-complexity parts at unprecedented accuracy using only commonly available computational resources.