ABSTRACT
This article presents and discusses the implementation of a direct volume rendering system for the Web, which articulates a large portion of the rendering task in the client machine. By placing the rendering emphasis in the local client, our system takes advantage of its power, while at the same time eliminates processing from unreliable bottlenecks (e.g. network). The system developed articulates in efficient manner the capabilities of the recently released WebGL standard, which makes available the accelerated graphic pipeline (formerly unusable). The dependency on specially customized hardware is eliminated, and yet efficient rendering rates are achieved. The Web increasingly competes against desktop applications in many scenarios, but the graphical demands of some of the applications (e.g. interactive scientific visualization by volume rendering), have impeded their successful settlement in Web scenarios. Performance, scalability, accuracy, security are some of the many challenges that must be solved before visual Web applications popularize. In this publication we discuss both performance and scalability of the volume rendering by WebGL ray-casting in two different but challenging application domains: medical imaging and radar meteorology.
- Behr, J., and Alexa, M. 2001. Volume visualization in vrml. In Proceedings of the sixth international conference on 3D Web technology, ACM New York, NY, USA, 23--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Behr, J., Eschler, P., Jung, Y., and Zöllner, M. 2009. X3dom: a dom-based html5/x3d integration model. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, ACM, 127--135. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Blazona, B., and Mihajlovic, Z. 2007. Visualization service based on web services. Journal of Computing and Information Technology 15, 4, 339.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Congote, J., Moreno, A., Barandiaran, I., Barandiaran, J., and Ruiz, O. 2010. Extending marching cubes with adaptative methods to obtain more accurate iso-surfaces. In Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics. Theory and Applications International Joint Conference, VISIGRAPP 2009, Lisboa, Portugal, February 5--8, 2009. Revised Selected Papers. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, January, 35--44.Google Scholar
- Fogal, T., and Kruger, J. 2010. Tuvok, an Architecture for Large Scale Volume Rendering. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization, M. Dogget, S. Laine, and W. Hunt, Eds., 57--66.Google Scholar
- Goenetxea, J., Moreno, A., Unzueta, L., Galdós, A., and Segura, A. 2010. Interactive and stereoscopic hybrid 3d viewer of radar data with gesture recognition. In Romay et al. {Romay et al. 2010}, 213--220. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hadwiger, M., Ljung, P., Salama, C. R., and Ropinski, T. 2009. Advanced illumination techniques for gpu-based volume raycasting. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Courses, ACM, 1--166. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hartley, R., and Zisserman, A. 2003. Multiple View Geometry in Computer Vision, second ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hibbard, W., and Santek, D. 1989. Interactivity is the key. In Proceedings of the 1989 Chapel Hill workshop on Volume visualization, ACM, New York, NY, USA, VVS '89, 39--43. Google ScholarDigital Library
- John, N., Aratow, M., Couch, J., Evestedt, D., Hudson, A., Polys, N., Puk, R., Ray, A., Victor, K., and Wang, Q. 2008. MedX3D: standards enabled desktop medical 3D. Studies in health technology and informatics 132, 189.Google Scholar
- John, N. W. 2007. The impact of web3d technologies on medical education and training. Computers and Education 49, 1, 19--31. Web3D Technologies in Learning, Education and Training. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kabongo, L., Maca, I., and Paloc, C. 2009. Development of a commercial cross-platform dicom viewer based on open source software. In International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery; CARS 2009 Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress and Exhibition, Springer, Berlin, Germany, P. H. U. Lemke, P. P. K. Inamura, P. P. K. Doi, P. P. M. W. Vannier, P. P. A. G. Farman, and D. PhD, Eds., vol. 4, International Foundation of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, S29--S30.Google Scholar
- Kruger, J., and Westermann, R. 2003. Acceleration techniques for gpu-based volume rendering. In VIS '03: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Visualization 2003 (VIS'03), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 38. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lacroute, P., and Levoy, M. 1994. Fast volume rendering using a shear-warp factorization of the viewing transformation. In Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, ACM, New York, NY, USA, SIGGRAPH '94, 451--458. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Levoy, M. 1988. Display of surfaces from volume data. IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl. 8, 3, 29--37. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mahmoudi, S. E., Akhondi-Asl, A., Rahmani, R., Faghih-Roohi, S., Taimouri, V., Sabouri, A., and Soltanian-Zadeh, H. 2009. Web-based interactive 2d/3d medical image processing and visualization software. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine In Press, Corrected Proof, --. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Marques, R., Santos, L. P., Leškovsky, P., and Paloc, C. 2009. Gpu ray casting. In 17 Encontro Português de Computaçao Gráfica, En Anexo, Covilha, Portugal, A. Coelho, A. P. Cláudio, F. Silva, and A. Gomes, Eds., 83--91.Google Scholar
- Marrin, C. 2011. WebGL Specification. Khronos WebGL Working Group.Google Scholar
- Meissner, M., Huang, J., Bartz, D., Mueller, K., and Crawfis, R. 2000. A practical evaluation of popular volume rendering algorithms. In Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization, Citeseer, 81--90. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Meyer-Spradow, J., Ropinski, T., Mensmann, J., and Hinrichs, K. H. 2009. Voreen: A rapid-prototyping environment for ray-casting-based volume visualizations. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (Applications Department) 29, 6 (Nov./Dec.), 6--13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Phong, B. T. 1975. Illumination for computer generated pictures. Commun. ACM 18, 6, 311--317. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Poliakov, A. V., Albright, E., Hinshaw, K. P., Corina, D. P., Ojemann, G., Martin, R. F., and Brinkley, J. F. 2005. Server-based approach to web visualization of integrated three-dimensional brain imaging data. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 12, 2, 140--151.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Riley, K., Song, Y., Kraus, M., Ebert, D. S., and Levit, J. J. 2006. Visualization of structured nonuniform grids. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 26, 46--55. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Romay, M. G., Corchado, E., and García-Sebastián, M. T., Eds. 2010. Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, 5th International Conference, HAIS 2010, San Sebastián, Spain, June 23--25, 2010. Proceedings, Part I, vol. 6076 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Segura, Á., Moreno, A., García, I., Aginako, N., Labayen, M., Posada, J., Aranda, J. A., and Andoin, R. G. D. 2009. Visual processing of geographic and environmental information in the basque country: Two basque case studies. In GeoSpatial Visual Analytics, R. D. Amicis, R. Stojanovic, and G. Conti, Eds., NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer Netherlands, October, 199--208.Google Scholar
- Sundaram, V., Zhao, L., Song, C., Benes, B., Veeramacheneni, R., and Kristof, P. 2008. Real-time Data Delivery and Remote Visualization through Multi-layer Interfaces. In Grid Computing Environments Workshop, 2008. GCE'08, 1--10.Google Scholar
- Westover, L. A. 1991. Splatting: a parallel, feed-forward volume rendering algorithm. PhD thesis, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. UMI Order No. GAX92--08005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yoo, S., Key, J., Choi, K., and Jo, J. 2005. Web-Based Hybrid Visualization of Medical Images. Lecture notes in computer science 3568, 376. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Interactive visualization of volumetric data with WebGL in real-time
Recommendations
Adaptive Illumination Sampling for Direct Volume Rendering
Advances in Computer GraphicsAbstractDirect volume rendering is used to visualize data from sources such as tomographic imaging devices. The perception of certain structures depends very much on visual cues such as lighting and shadowing. According illumination techniques have been ...
Interactive Stereoscopic Rendering of Volumetric Environments
Abstract--We present an efficient stereoscopic rendering algorithm supporting interactive navigation through large-scale 3D voxel-based environments. In this algorithm, most of the pixel values of the right image are derived from the left image by a ...
Progressive high-quality rendering for interactive information cartography using WebGL
Web3D '17: Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on 3D Web TechnologyInformation cartography services provided via web-based clients using real-time rendering do not always necessitate a continuous stream of updates in the visual display. This paper shows how progressive rendering by means of multi-frame sampling and ...
Comments