Abstract

Over the last decade, volume rendering has become an invaluable visualization technique for a wide variety of applications. This paper reviews three special-purpose architectures for interactive volume rendering: texture mapping, VIRIM, and VolumePro. Commercial implementations of these architectures are available or underway. The discussion of each architecture will focus on the algorithm, system architecture, memory system, and volume rendering performance.

Highlights

  • Visualization of scientific, engineering or biomedical data is a growing field within computer graphics

  • Image-order algorithms iterate over all pixels of the output image and determine the contributions of voxels towards each pixel

  • Object-order algorithms iterate over the volume data and determine the contribution of each voxel to the pixels

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Summary

Introduction

Visualization of scientific, engineering or biomedical data is a growing field within computer graphics. Volume rendering generates images directly from the volume data without intermediate surface models. It allows the display of internal structures, including amorphous and semi-transparent features. Object-order algorithms iterate over the volume data and determine the contribution of each voxel to the pixels. Each time rendering parameters such as voxel transparency or illumination are changed, the lengthy pre-processing must be repeated before the new image is displayed. Because hardware does not require pre-processing, it allows visualization of dynamically changing volume data, such as data from interactive tissue cutting during surgical simulation, or continuous data input from 3D ultrasound. We present general issues related to the design of high-performance volume rendering architectures.

Architectural Challenges
VolumePro
Summary

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