New compressed voxel model and its application

Using the voxel model to represent a bulky or high-precision object requires large storage size and long manipulation time. The dexel model method proposed by Van Hook^[3] can reduce greatly storage size, but, in our opinion, still suffers from certain shortcomings which we discuss in some detail in this paper. Therefore, we present a new geometrically compressed structure that utilizes the dexel model in three directions to represent a voxel model. This algorithm can greatly save the storage and simplify the Boolean operations. As compared with Van Hook's dexel model method, our new geometrically compressed structure method can deal conveniently with an object very complex in shape. We also discuss the visualization of the compressed voxel model and propose an optimal mesh extraction method based on the marching cubes algorithm. Finally we use OpenGL to display the triangular meshes. The compressed voxel model was applied to the virtual clay modeling of an automobile with excellent effect.