High-quality volume rendering with resampling in the frequency domain

Abstract

This work introduces a volume rendering technique that is conceptually based on the shear-warp factorization. We propose to perform the shear transformation in the frequency domain. Unlike the standard shear-warp algorithm, we allow for arbitrary sampling distances along the viewing rays, independent from the view direction. The accurate scaling of the volume slices is achieved by using the zero padding interpolation property. Finally, a high quality gradient estimation scheme is presented which uses the derivative theorem of the Fourier transform. Experimental results show that the presented method outperforms established algorithms in the quality of the produced images. If the data is sampled above the Nyquist rate the presented method is capable of a perfect reconstruction of the original function.