A hardware architecture for multi-resolution volume rendering

In this paper we propose a hardware accelerated ray-casting architecture for multi-resolution volumetric datasets. The architecture is targeted at rendering very large datasets with limited voxel memory resources for both cases where the working set of a frame does or does not fit into the voxel memory. We describe the multi-resolution model used to organize the volume data, especially the wavelet based compression scheme. An efficient hardware implementation of the wavelet decompression is presented and the considerations for volume memory management are discussed. By incorporating the wavelet decompression in hardware a multiple of the decompression bandwidth compared to a PC can be achieved We also show that the impact of our multi-resolution scheme on the actual ray-casting pipeline is minimal.

[1]  Paul Ning,et al.  Vector quantization for volume rendering , 1992, VVS.

[2]  Flemming Friche Rodler.  Wavelet Based 3D Compression for Very Large Volume Data Supporting Fast Random Access , 1999 .

[3]  Reinhard Männer,et al.  VIRIM: A massively parallel processor for real-time volume visualization in medicine , 1994, Comput. Graph..

[4]  Wolfgang Straßer,et al.  VIZARD—visualization accelerator for realtime display , 1997, HWWS '97.

[5]  Wolfgang Straßer,et al.  Real-time decompression and visualization of animated volume data , 2001, Proceedings Visualization, 2001. VIS '01..

[6]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  Hierarchical Visualization and Compression of Large Volume Datasets Using GPU Clusters , 2004, EGPGV.

[7]  M J Ackerman,et al.  The Visible Human Project , 1998, Proc. IEEE.

[8]  Wolfgang Straßer,et al.  Advanced techniques for high-quality multi-resolution volume rendering , 2004, Comput. Graph..

[9]  Hanspeter Pfister,et al.  The VolumePro real-time ray-casting system , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[10]  Wolfgang Straßer,et al.  Interactive rendering of large volume data sets , 2002, IEEE Visualization, 2002. VIS 2002..

[11]  Boon-Lock Yeo,et al.  Volume Rendering of DCT-Based Compressed 3D Scalar Data , 1995, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[12]  I. Daubechies,et al.  Wavelet Transforms That Map Integers to Integers , 1998 .

[13]  Reinhard Männer,et al.  VIRIM: A Massively Parallel Processor for Real-Time Volume Visualization in Medicine , 1994, Workshop on Graphics Hardware.

[14]  Insung Ihm,et al.  Wavelet-Based 3D Compression Scheme for Very Large Volume Data , 1998, Graphics Interface.

[15]  Johannes Hirche,et al.  VIZARD II: An FPGA-based Interactive Volume Rendering System , 2002, FPL.

[16]  David Salesin,et al.  Wavelets for computer graphics: theory and applications , 1996 .

[17]  Wim Sweldens,et al.  Building your own wavelets at home , 2000 .

[18]  Johannes Hirche,et al.  VoxelCache: a cache-based memory architecture for volume graphics , 2003, HWWS '03.

[19]  Rüdiger Westermann,et al.  Multiresolution and hierarchical methods for the visualization of volume data , 1999, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[20]  Rüdiger Westermann,et al.  A multiresolution framework for volume rendering , 1994, VVS '94.

[21]  Flemming Friche Rodler.  Wavelet based 3D compression with fast random access for very large volume data , 1999, Proceedings. Seventh Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (Cat. No.PR00293).