Accelerating voxel-based terrain rendering with keyframe-free image-based rendering

Abstract

We propose a voxel-based terrain rendering method which incorporates a novel keyframe-free image-based rendering algorithm and a new heuristic ray coherence raycasting algorithm. The current image is generated by warping the previous image with a revised 3D warping algorithm and filling holes by raycasting, accelerated by ray coherence and multiresolution ray traversal. This method not only achieves good performance, but also allows arbitrary viewing directions. We further accelerate the rendering with multiprocessor parallelism and have achieved a real-time rendering rate of 30Hz on a 16-processor SGI Power Challenge.