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Ray feature analysis for volume rendering

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Abstract

A major difficulty of volume rendering has been the recognition of different semantic regions which is crucial for the appropriate assignment of optical properties. Such difficulty arises from the fact that different semantic regions may share the same input value ranges. In this paper, we introduce the concept of ray-feature analysis and propose an on-the-fly state transition framework for the recognition of different semantic regions during volume rendering without the need of explicit segmentation information. In this framework, we consider the value along the path of a ray as a 1D-signal, and by making use of the feature analysis of these 1D-signals, semantic information of the current ray sample is extracted. To define the condition of state transition, we propose a method called “threshold based state transition”. Since the parameters of the threshold based state transition method is not intuitive, an automatic learning method which enables an interactive user labeling routine is proposed. Experimental results show that our proposed framework is cost effective for on-the-fly semantic region recognition, and is especially suitable for closed, mostly convex, multi-layered objects.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) under Grant 2011CB707700, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 81227901, 61231004, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Fellowship for Young International Scientists under Grant 2013Y1GB0005, the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) under 2012AA021105, the Guangdong Province-Chinese Academy of Sciences comprehensive strategic cooperation program under 2010A090100032 and 2012B090400039, the NSFC-NIH Biomedical collaborative research program under 81261120414, the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. 4132080, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. 2013JBZ014, the National Basic Research Program der Grant No. 61301002 and No. 61302025.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Molecular Imaging of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Fei Yang, Xiuli Li & Jie Tian

  2. School of Computer and Information Technology, Beijing JiaoTong University, Beijing, 100044, China

    Feng Yang

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  1. Fei Yang
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  2. Feng Yang
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  3. Xiuli Li
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  4. Jie Tian
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Correspondence to Feng Yang or Jie Tian.

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Yang, F., Yang, F., Li, X. et al. Ray feature analysis for volume rendering. Multimed Tools Appl 74, 7621–7641 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-014-1994-2

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