Accelerating Morphological Analysis with Graphics Hardware

Direct volume rendering is a common means of visualizing three-dimensional data nowadays. It is, however, still a very time consuming process to create informative and visual appealing images. Semi-automatic volume analysis procedures as morphological operators are a promising approach to improve the overall visualization cycle. However, these operators need quite some time for computation, reducing their usefulness for interactive visualization. Modern graphics hardware, on the other hand, has all necessary functions for doing hardware based morphological filtering. As the problem is mainly memory bandwidth bound, a solution based on graphics hardware can significantly reduce computation time in the filtering step, as the graphics hardware typically has much broader and faster memory paths. When using graphics hardware for mathematical computations, accuracy is usually quite a problem. However, morphological operators map so well onto the graphics pipeline, that no loss of accuracy occurs at all.