Abstract: Implicit curve plays an essential role in the fields of medicine, meteorology, geology, petroleum exploration, geophysics and so on. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to visualize implicit curves with sharp features, which can effectively extract the sharp features of such curves. The algorithm first defines the visualizing area of the curve and then adopts a quadtree that generates visualizing area by a top-down method. In each cell, the method produces a feature point of the numerical field, and connects different feature points to generate the dual mesh. Finally, the algorithm employs the Marching Squares algorithm to generate the curves. Experiments show that our method can efficiently extract the sharp features of implicit curves, and it can work with various implicit curves with or without sharp features robustly.

Key words:  implicit curve, graphic plotting, visualization, marching squares