A simple and flexible volume rendering framework for graphics-hardware-based raycasting

In this work we present a flexible framework for GPU-based volume rendering. The framework is based on a single pass volume raycasting approach and is easily extensible in terms of new shader functionality. We demonstrate the flexibility of our system by means of a number of high-quality standard and nonstandard volume rendering techniques. Our implementation shows a promising performance in a number of benchmarks while producing images of higher accuracy than obtained by standard pre-integrated slice-based volume rendering.

[1]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  Volume clipping via per-fragment operations in texture-based volume visualization , 2002, IEEE Visualization, 2002. VIS 2002..

[2]  Ulrich Neumann,et al.  Accelerating Volume Reconstruction With 3D Texture Hardware , 1994 .

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

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

[5]  David S. Ebert,et al.  Interactive translucent volume rendering and procedural modeling , 2002, IEEE Visualization, 2002. VIS 2002..

[6]  Thomas Ertl,et al.  Smart Hardware-Accelerated Volume Rendering , 2003, VisSym.

[7]  Martin Kraus,et al.  High-quality pre-integrated volume rendering using hardware-accelerated pixel shading , 2001, HWWS '01.

[8]  Joe Michael Kniss,et al.  Multidimensional Transfer Functions for Interactive Volume Rendering , 2002, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[9]  Nelson L. Max,et al.  Optical Models for Direct Volume Rendering , 1995, IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph..

[10]  M. Bauer,et al.  Interactive volume on standard PC graphics hardware using multi-textures and multi-stage rasterization , 2000, Workshop on Graphics Hardware.

[11]  Klaus Mueller,et al.  Empty space skipping and occlusion clipping for texture-based volume rendering , 2003, IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003..

[12]  Martin Kraus,et al.  Hardware-based ray casting for tetrahedral meshes , 2003, IEEE Visualization, 2003. VIS 2003..

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

[14]  Rüdiger Westermann,et al.  Efficiently using graphics hardware in volume rendering applications , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[15]  Min Chen,et al.  Refraction in Discrete Raytracing , 2001, VG.

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