Acceleration of direct volume rendering with programmable graphics hardware

Yalim Keles H., Es A., Isler V.

VISUAL COMPUTER, cilt.23, sa.1, ss.15-24, 2007 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 23 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2007
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/s00371-006-0084-5
  • Dergi Adı: VISUAL COMPUTER
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.15-24
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

We propose a method to accelerate direct volume rendering using programmable graphics hardware (GPU). In the method, texture slices are grouped together to form a texture slab. Rendering non-empty slabs from front to back viewing order generates the resultant image. Considering each pixel of the image as a ray, slab silhouette maps (SSMs) are used to skip empty spaces along the ray direction per pixel basis. Additionally, SSMs contain terminated ray information. The method relies on hardware z-occlusion culling and hardware occlusion queries to accelerate ray traversals. The advantage of this method is that SSMs are created on the fly by the GPU without any pre-processing. The cost of generating the acceleration structure is very small with respect to the total rendering time.