Fuzzy Mutual Information-Based Intraslice Grouped Ray Casting

Abstract

Abstract The traditional ray casting algorithm has the capability to render three-dimensional volume data in the viewable two-dimensional form by sampling the color data along the rays. The speed of the technique relies on the computation incurred by the huge volume of rays. The objective of the paper is to reduce the computations made over the rays by eventually reducing the number of samples being processed throughout the volume data. The proposed algorithm incorporates the grouping strategy based on fuzzy mutual information (FMI) over a group of voxels in the conventional ray casting to achieve the reduction. For the data group, with FMI in a desirable range, a single primary ray is cast into the group as a whole. As data are grouped before casting rays, the proposed algorithm reduces the interpolation calculation and thereby runs with lesser complexity, preserving the image quality.