In 3D image analysis

detection and reconstruction of boundary surfaces is a very important problem. Some methods have been developed for extracting or approximately computing continuous implicit boundary surfaces from 3D images. However

they have the drawback of incorrectly classifying some zero-crossing surface patches as boundary surface patches. In this paper

we present a new method to detect and trace boundary surfaces from 3D images. First

all cubes containing boundary surface patches are divided into two categories: cubes containing one connected boundary surface patch

called and first class of edge cubes

and cubes containing two or more disconnected boundary surface patches

called the second class of edge cubes. Then

according to the continuity and the connectivity of the boundary surface

we can track all the edge cubes from both classes. Finally

the boundary surface patches contained in the first class of edge cubes can be extracted directly

and the boundary surface patches contained in the second class of edge cubes are extracted based on the adjacent first class of edge cubes. Experimental results show that the proposed technique is feasible and effective

and can effectively overcome the shortcomings of existing methods.