Hardware-Accelerated High-Quality Reconstruction on PC Hardware

We describe a method for exploiting commodity 3D graphics hardware in order to achieve hardwareaccelerated high-quality filtering with arbitrary filter kernels. Our approach is based on reordering the evaluation of the filter convolution sum to accommodate the way the hardware works. We exploit multiple rendering passes together with the capability of current graphics hardware to index into several textures at the same time (multi-texturing). The method we present is applicable in one, two, and three dimensions. The cases we have been most interested in up to now are two-dimensional reconstruction of object-aligned slices through volumetric data, and three-dimensional reconstruction of arbitrarily oriented slices. As a fundamental building block, the basic algorithm can be used in order to directly render an entire volume by blending a stack of slices reconstructed with high quality on top of each other. However, it is important to emphasize that our approach has no fundamental restrictions with regard to the filters that can be employed. Thus, it could also be used for more general filtering tasks than reconstruction, e.g., image processing.