Voxel (Volumetric Pixel)
Last Updated: July 29, 2026 | By Mihail Sebastian | AI Dictionary
The 3D counterpart of a pixel: a single value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space, used in medical imaging, games, and 3D deep learning.
What is a Voxel (Volumetric Pixel)?
A voxel (volumetric pixel) is a single value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space: the 3D counterpart of a pixel. Where a pixel stores the color of one square in a flat image, a voxel stores the contents of one small cube in a volume.
What that cube holds depends on the application: tissue density in a CT scan, occupancy in a 3D map, block type in a game world.
Uses of Voxels
- Medical imaging: CT and MRI scanners produce voxel grids, with each voxel storing a measured tissue property at that point in the body.
- 3D deep learning: Voxel grids give convolutional neural networks a regular 3D input, just as pixel grids feed 2D vision models. The cost is memory: doubling resolution multiplies the voxel count by eight.
- Games and simulation: Voxel worlds, with Minecraft the best-known, stay editable because each cube is an independent piece of data.
Example of a Voxel
A chest CT scan produces a stack of cross-sectional slices that software assembles into one volume, on the order of 512 by 512 by several hundred voxels. Each voxel stores a radiodensity value for one small cube of tissue.
A 3D computer vision model can then segment the volume voxel by voxel, marking which cubes belong to a lung nodule. Because each voxel has a known physical size, the marked region converts directly into a volume in cubic millimeters, a measurement radiologists use to track growth between scans.
Related AI terms: Computer Vision · Convolutional Neural Network · Deep Learning · Tensors
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