Ray Tracing Generalized Tube Primitives: Method and Applications

We present a general high‐performance technique for ray tracing generalized tube primitives. Our technique efficiently supports tube primitives with fixed and varying radii, general acyclic graph structures with bifurcations, and correct transparency with interior surface removal. Such tube primitives are widely used in scientific visualization to represent diffusion tensor imaging tractographies, neuron morphologies, and scalar or vector fields of 3D flow. We implement our approach within the OSPRay ray tracing framework, and evaluate it on a range of interactive visualization use cases of fixed‐ and varying‐radius streamlines, pathlines, complex neuron morphologies, and brain tractographies. Our proposed approach provides interactive, high‐quality rendering, with low memory overhead.

[1]  Martin Falk,et al.  Atomistic Visualization of Mesoscopic Whole‐Cell Simulations Using Ray‐Casted Instancing , 2013, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[2]  Christian Rössl,et al.  Hierarchical opacity optimization for sets of 3D line fields , 2014, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[3]  Hans-Christian Hege,et al.  Fast Display of Illuminated Field Lines , 1997, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[4]  Stefan Gumhold,et al.  Splatting Illuminated Ellipsoids with Depth Correction , 2003, VMV.

[5]  Willem F. Bronsvoort,et al.  Ray tracing generalized cylinders , 1985, TOGS.

[6]  Aaron Knoll,et al.  OSPRay - A CPU Ray Tracing Framework for Scientific Visualization , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[7]  Valerio Pascucci,et al.  Direct Multifield Volume Ray Casting of Fiber Surfaces , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[8]  Andreas Dietrich,et al.  OptiX: a general purpose ray tracing engine , 2010, SIGGRAPH 2010.

[9]  Charles D. Hansen,et al.  Distributed interactive ray tracing for large volume visualization , 2003, IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics, 2003. PVG 2003..

[10]  J. Jacobs,et al.  Regional dendritic and spine variation in human cerebral cortex: a quantitative golgi study. , 2001, Cerebral cortex.

[11]  Eduard Gröller,et al.  Strategies for interactive exploration of 3D flow using evenly-spaced illuminated streamlines , 2003, SCCG '03.

[12]  David K. McAllister,et al.  OptiX: a general purpose ray tracing engine , 2010, ACM Trans. Graph..

[13]  Stefan Jeschke,et al.  GPU Rendering of Relief Mapped Conical Frusta , 2009, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[14]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Path Line Attributes - an Information Visualization Approach to Analyzing the Dynamic Behavior of 3D Time-Dependent Flow Fields , 2009, Topology-Based Methods in Visualization II.

[15]  Christian H. Bischof,et al.  Efficient visualization of large amounts of particle trajectories in virtual environments using virtual tubelets , 2004, VRCAI '04.

[16]  Ingo Wald,et al.  Packet-based Ray Tracing of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces , 2007 .

[17]  Simone Vantini,et al.  AneuRisk65: A dataset of three-dimensional cerebral vascular geometries , 2014 .

[18]  Ingo Wald,et al.  Embree: a kernel framework for efficient CPU ray tracing , 2014, ACM Trans. Graph..

[19]  Srdjan D Antic,et al.  Quantitative assessment of the distributions of membrane conductances involved in action potential backpropagation along basal dendrites. , 2009, Journal of neurophysiology.

[20]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  GPU-Based Hyperstreamlines for Diffusion Tensor Imaging , 2006, EuroVis.

[21]  Bernhard Preim,et al.  Visualization of vasculature with convolution surfaces: method, validation and evaluation , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[22]  Christopher R. Johnson,et al.  A High-Resolution Head and Brain Computer Model for Forward and Inverse EEG Simulation , 2019, bioRxiv.

[23]  Hans Hagen,et al.  Efficient Computation and Visualization of Coherent Structures in Fluid Flow Applications , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[24]  Ieee Transactions.  A Coherent Grid Traversal Approach to Visualizing Particle-Based Simulation Data , 2007 .

[25]  Hank Childs,et al.  VisIt: An End-User Tool for Visualizing and Analyzing Very Large Data , 2011 .

[26]  Stefan Bruckner,et al.  BrainGazer - Visual Queries for Neurobiology Research , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[27]  Ingo Wald,et al.  Exploiting Local Orientation Similarity for Efficient Ray Traversal of Hair and Fur , 2014, High Performance Graphics.

[28]  Matthias Nießner,et al.  Efficient ray tracing of subdivision surfaces using tessellation caching , 2015, HPG '15.

[29]  K Schulten,et al.  VMD: visual molecular dynamics. , 1996, Journal of molecular graphics.

[30]  Vid Petrovic,et al.  Visualizing Whole-Brain DTI Tractography with GPU-based Tuboids and LoD Management , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[31]  B. Pál,et al.  Astrocyte-Dependent Slow Inward Currents (SICs) Participate in Neuromodulatory Mechanisms in the Pedunculopontine Nucleus (PPN) , 2017, Front. Cell. Neurosci..

[32]  David H. Laidlaw,et al.  Visualizing Diffusion Tensor MR Images Using Streamtubes and Streamsurfaces , 2003, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[33]  Jarke J. van Wijk,et al.  Ray tracing objects defined by sweeping a sphere , 1984, Comput. Graph..

[34]  Ivica Kostović,et al.  Perinatal growth of prefrontal layer III pyramids in Down syndrome. , 2002, Pediatric neurology.

[35]  Gerik Scheuermann,et al.  LineAO - Improved Three-Dimensional Line Rendering , 2013, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[36]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  MegaMol—A Prototyping Framework for Particle-Based Visualization , 2015, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[37]  Hans Hagen,et al.  Topology tracking for the visualization of time-dependent two-dimensional flows , 2002, Comput. Graph..

[38]  William E. Lorensen,et al.  The visualization toolkit (2nd ed.): an object-oriented approach to 3D graphics , 1998 .

[39]  Kelly P. Gaither,et al.  Ray tracing and volume rendering large molecular data on multi-core and many-core architectures , 2013, UltraVis@SC.

[40]  Luis Pastor,et al.  Neuronize: a tool for building realistic neuronal cell morphologies , 2013, Front. Neuroanat..

[41]  Roger Crawfis,et al.  View point evaluation and streamline filtering for flow visualization , 2011, 2011 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium.

[42]  Kwan-Liu Ma,et al.  An Illustrative Visualization Framework for 3D Vector Fields , 2011, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[43]  Valerio Pascucci,et al.  CPU ray tracing large particle data with balanced P-k-d trees , 2015, 2015 IEEE Scientific Visualization Conference (SciVis).

[44]  Christiaan Gribble.  Implementing Node Culling Multi-Hit BVH Traversal in Embree Christiaan Gribble , 2016 .

[45]  John E. Stone,et al.  An efficient library for parallel ray tracing and animation , 1998 .

[46]  G. Ascoli,et al.  NeuroMorpho.Org: A Central Resource for Neuronal Morphologies , 2007, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[47]  Bob Laramee.  Feature Extraction and Visualization of Flow Fields , 2002 .

[48]  Daniel Baum,et al.  Interactive Visualization of RNA and DNA Structures , 2019, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[49]  Christopher Nimsky,et al.  Hybrid Visualization for White Matter Tracts using Triangle Strips and Point Sprites , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[50]  Jarno van der Linden,et al.  DTI Volume Rendering Techniques for Visualising the Brain Anatomy , 2005 .

[51]  Kwan-Liu Ma,et al.  View-Dependent Streamlines for 3D Vector Fields , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[52]  Rüdiger Westermann,et al.  A Voxel-Based Rendering Pipeline for Large 3D Line Sets , 2018, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[53]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Topological methods for 2D time-dependent vector fields based on stream lines and path lines , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[54]  Christian Rössl,et al.  Opacity optimization for 3D line fields , 2013, ACM Trans. Graph..

[55]  H. Markram.  The Blue Brain Project , 2006, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[56]  H.-C. Hege,et al.  Interactive visualization of 3D-vector fields using illuminated stream lines , 1996, Proceedings of Seventh Annual IEEE Visualization '96.

[57]  Cem Yuksel,et al.  Visualization of Fibrous and Thread-like Data , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[58]  M. Rüegg,et al.  Ablation of the mTORC2 component rictor in brain or Purkinje cells affects size and neuron morphology , 2013, The Journal of cell biology.

[59]  Utkarsh Ayachit,et al.  The ParaView Guide: A Parallel Visualization Application , 2015 .

[60]  Kwan-Liu Ma,et al.  Scalable self-orienting surfaces: a compact, texture-enhanced representation for interactive visualization of 3D vector fields , 2002, 10th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications, 2002. Proceedings..

[61]  Greg Humphreys,et al.  Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation , 2004 .

[62]  David E. DeMarle,et al.  A Study of Ray Tracing Large-scale Scientific Data in Parallel Visualization Applications , 2012 .

[63]  Clifford Stein,et al.  Sony Pictures Imageworks Arnold , 2018, ACM Trans. Graph..

[64]  D A Steinman,et al.  Simulated pathline visualization of computed periodic blood flow patterns. , 2000, Journal of biomechanics.

[65]  Peter-Pike J. Sloan,et al.  Interactive ray tracing for isosurface rendering , 1998, Proceedings Visualization '98 (Cat. No.98CB36276).

[66]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Visualization with stylized line primitives , 2005, VIS 05. IEEE Visualization, 2005..