GPU acceleration for octree volume rendering

Abstract

We presented a novel approach for empty space skipping for object-order volume rendering.A two-staged space skipping was introduced:the first stage applied bricking on a regular grid,and the second stage used octree to reach a finer granularity.The approach further took into account that rendered volume may exceed the available texture memory and allow fast runtime changes of transfer function.For the bottleneck that heavy workload was assigned to CPU in our approach,a novel algorithm was proposed.The algorithm efficiently computed slicing for texture based volume render in Graphic Processing Unit(GPU);balanced the workload between CPU and GPU.Combining the two approaches above,we can render large volume data efficiently without compromising the image quality.