Abstract
Non-photorealistic (illustrative) rendering augments typical rendering models to selectively emphasize or de-emphasize specific structures of rendered objects. Illustrative techniques may affect not only the rendering style of specific portions of an object but also their visibility, ensuring that less important regions do not occlude more important ones. Cutaway views completely remove occluding, unimportant structures—possibly also removing valuable context information—while existing solutions for smooth reduction of occlusion based on importance lack precise visibility control, simplicity and generality. We introduce a new front-to-back fragment composition equation that directly takes into account a measure of sample importance and allows smooth and precise importance-based visibility control. We demonstrate the generality of our composition equation with several illustrative effects, which were obtained by using a set of importance measures calculated on the fly or defined by the user. The presented composition method is suitable for direct volume rendering as well as rendering of layered 3D models. We discuss both cases and show examples, though focusing mainly on illustration of volumetric data.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Bruckner, S., Grimm, S., Kanitsar, A., Gröller, M.E.: Illustrative context-preserving exploration of volume data. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 12(6), 1559–1569 (2006)
Bruckner, S., Gröller, M.E.: Instant volume visualization using maximum intensity difference accumulation. Comput. Graph. Forum 28(3), 775–782 (2009)
Bruckner, S., Rautek, P., Viola, I., Roberts, M., Sousa, M.C., Gröller, M.E.: Hybrid visibility compositing and masking for illustrative rendering. Computers & Graphics (34), 361–369 (2010)
Correa, C.D., Ma, K.L.: Visibility-driven transfer functions. In: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium, pp. 177–184 (2009)
Csébfalvi, B., Mroz, L., Hauser, H., Knig, A., Grller, M.E.: Fast visualization of object contours by nonphotorealistic volume rendering. Comput. Graph. Forum 20, 452–460 (2001)
Everitt, C.: Interactive order-independent transparency. Tech. rep., NVIDIA Corporation (2001)
Kraus, M.: Scale-invariant volume rendering. In: Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Visualization Conference (2005)
Krüger, J., Schneider, J., Westermann, R.: ClearView: An interactive context preserving hotspot visualization technique. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 12(5), 941–948 (2006)
Levoy, M.: Display of surfaces from volume data. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 8(3), 29–37 (1988)
Max, N.: Optical models for direct volume rendering. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 1(2), 99–108 (1995)
Neumann, L., Csébfalvi, B., König, A., Gröller, E.: Gradient estimation in volume data using 4d linear regression. Comput. Graph. Forum 19(3), 351–358 (2000)
Pfister, H., Lorensen, B., Bajaj, C., Kindlmann, G., Schroeder, W., Avila, L.S., Martin, K., Machiraju, R., Lee, J.: The transfer function bake-off. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 21(3), 16–22 (2001)
Pinto, F.d.M., Freitas, C.M.D.S.: Importance-aware composition for illustrative volume rendering. In: Proceedings of the 2010 XXII Brazilian Symposium on Computer Graphics and Image Processing (2010)
Rautek, P., Bruckner, S., Gröller, M.E.: Interaction dependent semantics for illustrative volume rendering. Comput. Graph. Forum 27(3), 847–854 (2008)
Rheingans, P., Ebert, D.: Volume illustration: Nonphotorealistic rendering of volume models. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 7(3), 253–264 (2001)
Tenginakai, S., Lee, J., Machiraju, R.: Salient iso-surface detection with model-independent statistical signatures. In: Proceedings of the 12th IEEE Visualization Conference, pp. 231–238 (2001)
Treavett, S.M.F., Chen, M.: Pen-and-ink rendering in volume visualisation. In: Proceedings of the 11th IEEE Visualization Conference, pp. 203–210 (2000)
Viola, I., Gröller, M.E.: Smart visibility in visualization. In: Proceedings of EG Workshop on Computational Aesthetics Computational Aesthetics in Graphics, Visualization and Imaging, pp. 209–216 (2005)
Viola, I., Kanitsar, A., Gröller, M.E.: Importance-driven volume rendering. In: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE Visualization Conference, pp. 139–146 (2004)
Viola, I., Kanitsar, A., Gröller, M.E.: Importance-driven feature enhancement in volume visualization. IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. 11(4), 408–418 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
de Moura Pinto, F., Dal Sasso Freitas, C.M. Illustrating volume data sets and layered models with importance-aware composition. Vis Comput 27, 875–886 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-011-0606-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-011-0606-7