High-Quality Rendering of Compressed Volume Data Formats

Rendering directly from packed or compressed volume data formats using graphics hardware has advantages in terms of memory consumption and bandwidth, but results in lower-quality images due to the prohibitive cost of performing interpolation and gradient-based shading on the reconstructed data. The problem with the existing method lies in its close coupling of decompression and interpolation. We demonstrate that deferred filtering overcomes this problem by using a two-pass decompression and rendering strategy. With this method interpolation and gradient calculations are very efficient, allowing high quality rendering directly from packed or compressed volume data. We evaluate the cost of creating interpolated, gradient-shaded renderings using traditional on-the-fly decompression and deferred filtering, and show that deferred filtering can provide up to twenty times speed-up for high quality rendering.