Hardware Support for the Display and Manipulation of Binary Voxel Models

We describe some of our experiences with the implementation of a 3D reconstruction system for the visualization of the shapes and structural development of biological objects. We use a binary voxel model as volumetric representation of the reconstructed objects. The manipulation and display of volumetric representations involve the processing of huge amounts of data, making hardware support a virtual necessity. Instead of attempting to design special purpose hardware, we decided to try and exploit readily available image processing hardware. We use one of the available frame buffers for storage and direct display of the binary voxel data set. The other frame buffer holds either a surface normal view, a depth-shaded pre-image or the binary voxel data set of a secondary object. Altering the light direction or shading function is performed by manipulating the hardware output lookup tables. An additional frame processor is employed for running various filter operators over pre-images, computing bitwise logical functions on two binary voxel data sets and for pan and zoom operations.

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