An image division approach for volume ray casting in multi-threading environment

Abstract

For an efficient parallel volume ray casting suitable for recent multi-core CPUs, we propose an image-ordered approach by using a cost function to allocate loaded tasks impartially per each processing node. At the first frame, we divide an image space evenly, and we compute a cost function. By applying the frame coherence property, we divide the image space unevenly using the computed previous cost function since the next frame. Conventional image-ordered parallel approaches have focused on dividing and compositing volume datasets. However, the divisions and accumulations are negligible for recent multi-core CPUs because they are performed inside one physical CPU. As a result, we can reduce the rendering time without deteriorating the image quality by applying a cost function reflecting on all time-consuming steps of the volume ray casting.