SATO: Straighten Any 3D Tubular Object

Abstract

3D tubular objects have complex spatial shapes. Direct volume visualization cannot intuitively display their morphological characteristics and surface abnormalities. Straightening reformation is an effective visualization method for tubular objects. It uses a swept frame to sample cross sections along the centerline of the tubular object to generate straightening result. So far, however, current methods cannot visualize the full 3D view and fail to interface with downstream morphological analysis. Furthermore, current swept frames impose strict restrictions on the shape of tubular objects and are computationally expensive. In this study, we propose a novel swept frame based on vector rotation and construct an automatic straightening reformation pipeline. Our method is applicable to various tubular objects and can be efficiently executed recursively while ensuring that the straightening results have no rotation bias. Extensive experiments on eight different tubular objects and quantitative evaluation on various downstream applications demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our straightening pipeline. Code is available at https://github.com/Yanfeng-Zhou/SATO.