Fast Computation of Volumet6 Thickness of 3D Objects Using GPU

We proposed a novel definition for thickness, termed “volumetric thickness” to clearly visualize thickness distribution in solid objects. Because our proposed method analyzes the thickness at internal points of an object, the computational complexity for its implementation is significantly higher than that of the conventional ray and sphere methods, which analyze do so only at points on the object's surface. This letter describes a fast analysis technique for volumetric thickness of 3D objects. To realize the computation in a realistic timeframe, we utilize a culling technique with hierarchical bounding boxes and a parallel processing function within the graphics processing unit (GPU). In the culling process, the necessary data is collected for appropriate utilization of the fast shared memory of GPU. We also present the numerical experiments conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.