Interactive volume on standard PC graphics hardware using multi-textures and multi-stage rasterization

Interactive direct volume rendering has yet been restricted to high-end graphics workstations and special-purpose hardware, due to the large amount of trilinear interpolations, that are necessary to obtain high image quality. Implementations that use the 2D-texture capabilities of standard PC hardware, usually render object-aligned slices in order to substitute trilinear by bilinear interpolation. However the resulting images often contain visual artifacts caused by the lack of spatial interpolation. In this paper we propose new rendering techniques that significantly improve both performance and image quality of the 2D-texture based approach. We will show how in ulti-texturing capabilitiesof modern consumer PC graphboards are exploited to enable in teractive high quality volume visualization on low-cost hardware. Furthermore we demonstrate how multi-stage rasterization hardware can be used to efficiently render shaded isosurfaces and to compute diffuse illumination for semi-transparent volume rendering at interactive frame rates.