What is "marching cubes"

n. (context computer graphics English) An algorithm for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three-dimensional scalar field.

Marching cubes is a computer graphics algorithm, published in the 1987 SIGGRAPH proceedings by Lorensen and Cline, for extracting a polygonal mesh of an isosurface from a three-dimensional discrete scalar field (sometimes called voxels). This paper is one of the most cited papers in the computer graphics field. The applications of this algorithm are mainly concerned with medical visualizations such as CT and MRI scan data images, and special effects or 3-D modelling with what is usually called metaballs or other metasurfaces. An analogous two-dimensional method is called the marching squares algorithm.