GPU accelerated, robust method for voxelization of solid objects

Solid voxelization represents the process of transforming a polygonal mesh into a voxel representation by associating each polygon of a mesh with the cells in the voxel grid. We introduce a novel approach for the voxelization of solid objects, designed for Graphics Processing Units (GPU). The method is based on a heuristic approach that computes an approximate distance field instead of using mesh surface normals or exact point-to-triangle distances. Two main steps are required: voxel marking and distance field computation. In the first step, each voxel is marked based on its location relative to the mesh (inside, outside of the domain or on its boundary), and, during the second step, a signed distance field is computed. Experiments focused on meshes encountered in medical imaging applications: a left ventricle and a coronary artery. The proposed method is found to be exceptionally robust as it is able to handle meshes with severe defects such as self intersections and holes. The GPU based implementation is on average 20 times faster than the multi-core CPU based implementation.