These are the Volume Graphics 2003 (VG'03) Workshop Proceedings. This workshop, held in Tokyo, Japan, on July 7-8, 2003, was organized as a follow-up to the very successful biennial international workshops on volume graphics, which were held in Swansea, UK (1999) and Stony Brook, New York, USA (2001). The Volume Graphics workshop series and its conjugate, the Volume Visualization and Graphics Symposium series, take place in alternate years to jointly serve as the leading forums for presenting the state-of-the-art and forecasting future trends in volumetric imaging and its applications. VG'03 was co-scheduled with the Computer Graphics International 2003 Conference (CGI'03) in Tokyo in order to mutually benefit the two events.This VG'03 workshop is co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TCVG) and the European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics) in coop-eration with ACM SIGGRAPH. This year the proceedings are published by ACM SIGGRAPH for the first time, making the contributions to our workshop much more visible than in past years. We would like to thank our sponsors and the members of the organization committee, especially Heinrich Müller, the Eurographics workshops board chair; Bowen Loftin, IEEE CS TCVG chair; Werner Purgathofer, the Eurographics workshop series editor; and Stephen Spencer, ACM SIGGRAPH Director for Publications.Each of the submitted papers was reviewed by four domain experts. The best 17 papers were accepted and appear in these proceedings. Thanks to the devoted assistance of the program committee members and addition-al reviewers, the accepted papers encompass all aspects of volume graphics and visualization: from modeling, representation, manipulation, rendering, to systems and applications; and constitute six plenary regular ses-sions, together with a keynote speech and a capstone address during the two full workshop days.
Rapid emission tomography reconstruction
We present new implementations of the Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm and the related Ordered Subset EM (OSEM) algorithm. Our implementation is based on modern graphics hardware and achieves speedups of over eight times ...
Chronovolumes: a direct rendering technique for visualizing time-varying data
We present a new method for displaying time varying volumetric data. The core of the algorithm is an integration through time producing a single view volume that captures the essence of multiple time steps in a sequence. The resulting view volume then ...
Spatial transfer functions: a unified approach to specifying deformation in volume modeling and animation
In this paper, we introduce the concept of spatial transfer functions as a unified approach to volume modeling and animation. A spatial transfer function is a function that defines the geometrical transformation of a scalar field in space, and is a ...
Real-time volume manipulation
In this paper, we describe a set of algorithms and an implementation (called VolEdit), for interactively manipulating 3D volumetric objects (datasets). The system utilizes skeletons, which allows users/animators to interactively and intuitively specify ...
Volumetric ablation rendering
In this paper, we propose a physically-based method for simulating the process of ablation on volumetric models. We demonstrate the visual effect of ablative processes, such as a beam of heat emitted from a blow torch or a pencil of sand expelled from a ...
The design and evaluation of a pipelined image compositing device for massively parallel volume rendering
An experimental study of software image compositing that we have carried out on a 512-node PC cluster shows the necessity of hardware compositing support to make possible real-time volume visualization scalable with large PC clusters. This paper ...
OpenVL: the open volume library
OpenVL is a modular, extensible, and high performance library for handling volumetric datasets. It provides a standard, uniform, and easy to use API for accessing volumetric data. It allows the volumetric data to be laid out in different ways to ...
Accuracy-based sampling and reconstruction with adaptive grid for parallel hierarchical tetrahedrization
Recent advances in volume scanning techniques have made the task of acquiring volume data of 3-D objects easier and more accurate. Since the quantity of such acquired data is generally very large, a volume model capable of compressing data while ...
Multiresolution volume simplification and polygonization
We propose a multiresolution volume simplification and polygonization algorithm. Traditionally, voxel-based algorithms lack the adaptive resolution support and consequently simplified volumes quickly lose sharp features after several levels of ...
Out-of-core encoding of large tetrahedral meshes
In this paper, an out-of-core data compression method is presented to encode large Finite Element Analysis (FEA) meshes. The method is comprised with two stages. At the first stage, the input FEA mesh is divided into blocks, called octants, based on an ...
Cell projection of convex polyhedra
Finite element methods commonly use unstructured grids as the computational domain. As a matter of fact, the volume visualization of these unstructured grids is a time consuming task. Here, the fastest known object order algorithm is the projected ...
Integrating pre-integration into the shear-warp algorithm
The shear-warp volume rendering algorithm is one of the fastest algorithms for volume rendering, but it achieves this rendering speed only by sacrificing interpolation between the slices of the volume data. Unfortunately, this restriction to bilinear ...
Hybrid forward resampling and volume rendering
The transforming and rendering of discrete objects, such as traditional images (with or without depths) and volumes, can be considered as resampling problem -- objects are reconstructed, transformed, filtered, and finally sampled on the screen grids. In ...
A volume rendering approach for sea surfaces taking into account second order scattering using scattering maps
We present a fast volume rendering technique for sea surfaces taking into account second order scattering using graphics hardware. To generate realistic images of the sea surfaces, accurate simulation of light transport within water is necessary. In ...
An interactive volume visualization system for transient flow analysis
This paper describes the design and performance of an interactive visualization system developed specifically for improved understanding of time-varying volume data from thermal flow simulations for vehicle cabin and ventilation design. The system uses ...
Volume CAD
With the transition of the most fundamental data in manufacturing from drawings to three-dimensional (3D) CAD (Computer Aided Design) data, we are now able to fabricate products with beautiful curved surfaces, for example, automobiles, cellular phones, ...