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Acceleration of direct volume rendering with programmable graphics hardware

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tübitak-Uzay, METU, Ankara, Turkey

    Hacer Yalım Keleş & Alphan Es

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, METU, Ankara, Turkey

    Veysi İşler

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  1. Hacer Yalım Keleş
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  2. Alphan Es
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  3. Veysi İşler
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Correspondence to Hacer Yalım Keleş.

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Yalım Keleş, H., Es, A. & İşler, V. Acceleration of direct volume rendering with programmable graphics hardware. Visual Comput 23, 15–24 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00371-006-0084-5

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