Raycasting of Nonregularly Structured Volume Data

Raycasting is an efficient, but computation‐intensive technique for the direct rendering of volumetric data. Nonregularly structured volume data is produced in a variety of applications, such as numerical simulation, ultrasonic inspection, or seismic measurement. Unfortunately, in raycasting nonregulary structured grids, sampling data along the rays is even more computation‐intensive. One idea might be to resample the data onto a regular grid for further processing. It is shown, that resampling typical grids results either in extreme sub‐ sampling of the most interesting areas or in data sets too huge to handle. Additionally, no better hardware will overcome the fact that all topology and context information is lost through resampling. Therefore, dedicated algorithms for the raycasting of nonregularly structured volumes are required.