GPU-based Volume Ray-casting supporting Specular Reflection and Refraction

Nowadays mostly local illumination models are used when rendering volumetric data. When computing global light effects, interactive frame rates are usually hard to achieve. We present an extension of GPU-based volume ray-casting, which allows to compute specular reflection and refraction effects at interactive frame rates on current commodity graphics hardware. In contrast to other techniques proposed for integrating these effects into volume rendering, our technique does not constrain the type of rendering used, i. e., it can be used with DVR as well as isosurface rendering.