Coherent multiresolution isosurface ray tracing

We implement and evaluate a fast ray tracing method for rendering large structured volumes. Input data is losslessly compressed into an octree, enabling residency in CPU main memory. We cast packets of coherent rays through a min/max acceleration structure within the octree, employing a slice-based technique to amortize the higher cost of compressed data access. By employing a multiresolution level of detail (LOD) scheme in conjunction with packets, coherent ray tracing can efficiently render inherently incoherent scenes of complex data. We achieve higher performance with lesser footprint than previous isosurface ray tracers, and deliver large frame buffers, smooth gradient normals and shadows at relatively lesser cost. In this context, we weigh the strengths of coherent ray tracing against those of the conventional single-ray approach, and present a system that visualizes large volumes at full data resolution on commodity computers.

[1]  J. Wilhelms,et al.  Octrees for faster isosurface generation , 1992, TOGS.

[2]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  R-LODs: fast LOD-based ray tracing of massive models , 2006, SIGGRAPH Sketches.

[3]  Philipp Slusallek,et al.  Interactive iso-surface ray tracing of massive volumetric data sets , 2007, EGPGV '07.

[4]  Martin Kraus,et al.  Adaptive texture maps , 2002, HWWS '02.

[5]  Marc Levoy,et al.  Efficient ray tracing of volume data , 1990, TOGS.

[6]  Bruno Lévy,et al.  Distributed Shared Memory for Roaming Large Volumes , 2006, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[7]  H. Hagen,et al.  Interactive Ray Tracing of Arbitrary Implicits with SIMD Interval Arithmetic , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

[8]  Daniel Cohen-Or,et al.  Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization , 2000 .

[9]  John Amanatides,et al.  A Fast Voxel Traversal Algorithm for Ray Tracing , 1987, Eurographics.

[10]  Homan Igehy,et al.  Tracing ray differentials , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[11]  Roberto Scopigno,et al.  Multiresolution volume visualization with a texture-based octree , 2001, The Visual Computer.

[12]  Xavier Tricoche,et al.  Interactive point-based isosurface extraction , 2004, IEEE Visualization 2004.

[13]  Peter-Pike J. Sloan,et al.  Interactive ray tracing for volume visualization , 1999, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[14]  Rüdiger Westermann,et al.  Real-time exploration of regular volume data by adaptive reconstruction of isosurfaces , 1999, The Visual Computer.

[15]  Charles D. Hansen,et al.  View dependent isosurface extraction , 1998, Proceedings Visualization '98 (Cat. No.98CB36276).

[16]  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..

[17]  Ingo Wald,et al.  Ray tracing deformable scenes using dynamic bounding volume hierarchies , 2007, TOGS.

[18]  Ingo Wald,et al.  A Coherent Grid Traversal Approach to Visualizing Particle-Based Simulation Data , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[19]  Hans-Peter Seidel,et al.  Faster isosurface ray tracing using implicit KD-trees , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

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

[21]  I. Wald,et al.  Interactive Isosurface Ray Tracing of Large Octree Volumes , 2006, 2006 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing.

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

[23]  Bernd Hamann,et al.  Multiresolution techniques for interactive texture-based volume visualization , 1999, Proceedings Visualization '99 (Cat. No.99CB37067).

[24]  Ingo Wald,et al.  Ray tracing animated scenes using coherent grid traversal , 2006, ACM Trans. Graph..

[25]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  R-LODs: fast LOD-based ray tracing of massive models , 2006, SIGGRAPH '06.

[26]  Alexander Reshetov,et al.  Multi-level ray tracing algorithm , 2005, ACM Trans. Graph..

[27]  Philipp Slusallek,et al.  Fast and Accurate Ray-Voxel Intersection Techniques for Iso-Surface Ray Tracing , 2004, VMV.

[28]  William E. Lorensen,et al.  Marching cubes: A high resolution 3D surface construction algorithm , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[29]  Adam Finkelstein,et al.  Improving progressive view-dependent isosurface propagation , 2002, Comput. Graph..

[30]  Hans Hagen,et al.  Interactive Ray Tracing of Arbitrary Implicit Functions , 2007 .

[31]  Brian Cabral,et al.  Accelerated volume rendering and tomographic reconstruction using texture mapping hardware , 1994, VVS '94.

[32]  Anna Vilanova,et al.  Making Grass and Fur Move , 2006, J. WSCG.

[33]  Markus Wagner,et al.  Interactive Rendering with Coherent Ray Tracing , 2001, Comput. Graph. Forum.

[34]  J. Edward Swan,et al.  Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '02 , 2001 .

[35]  Kellogg S. Booth,et al.  Report from the chair , 1986 .

[36]  Gunter Knittel,et al.  The ULTRAVIS System , 2000, 2000 IEEE Symposium on Volume Visualization (VV 2000).