Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing 3D arrays of sampled data. It has applications in areas such as medical imaging and scientific visualization, but its use has been limited by its high computational expense. Early implementations of volume rendering used brute-force techniques that require on the order of 100 seconds to render typical data sets on a workstation. Algorithms with optimizations that exploit coherence in the data have reduced rendering times to the range of ten seconds but are still not fast enough for interactive visualization applications. In this thesis we present a family of volume rendering algorithms that reduces rendering times to one second. First we present a scanline-order volume rendering algorithm that exploits coherence in both the volume data and the image. We show that scanline-order algorithms are fundamentally more efficient than commonly-used ray casting algorithms because the latter must perform analytic geometry calculations (e.g. intersecting rays with axis-aligned boxes). The new scanline-order algorithm simply streams through the volume and the image in storage order. We describe variants of the algorithm for both parallel and perspective projections and

Advances in 3D scanning technologies have enabled the practical creation of meshes with hundreds of millions of polygons. Traditional algorithms for display, simplification, and progressive transmission of meshes are impractical for data sets of this size. We describe a system for representing and progressively displaying these meshes that combines a multiresolution hierarchy based on bounding spheres with a rendering system based on points. A single data structure is used for view frustum culling, backface culling, level-of-detail selection, and rendering. The representation is compact and can be computed quickly, making it suitable for large data sets. Our implementation, written for use in a large-scale 3D digitization project, launches quickly, maintains a user-settable interactive frame rate regardless of object complexity or camera position, yields reasonable image quality during motion, and refines progressively when idle to a high final image quality. We have demonstrated the system on scanned models containing hundreds of millions of samples.

A novel scene reconstruction technique is presented, different from previous approaches in its ability to cope with large changes in visibility and its modeling of intrinsic scene color and texture information. The method avoids image correspondence problems by working in a discretized scene space whose voxels are traversed in a fixed visibility ordering. This strategy takes full account of occlusions and allows the input cameras to be far apart and widely distributed about the environment. The algorithm identifies a special set of invariant voxels which together form a spatial and photometric reconstruction of the scene, fully consistent with the input images.

Abstract—In this paper, we present a framework for high quality splatting based on elliptical Gaussian kernels. To avoid aliasing artifacts, we introduce the concept of a resampling filter, combining a reconstruction kernel with a low-pass filter. Because of the similarity to Heckbert’s EWA (elliptical weighted average) filter for texture mapping, we call our technique EWA splatting. Our framework allows us to derive EWA splat primitives for volume data and for point-sampled surface data. It provides high image quality without aliasing artifacts or excessive blurring for volume data and, additionally, features anisotropic texture filtering for point-sampled surfaces. It also handles nonspherical volume kernels efficiently; hence, it is suitable for regular, rectilinear, and irregular volume datasets. Moreover, our framework introduces a novel approach to compute the footprint function, facilitating efficient perspective projection of arbitrary elliptical kernels at very little additional cost. Finally, we show that EWA volume reconstruction kernels can be reduced to surface reconstruction kernels. This makes our splat primitive universal in rendering surface and volume data. Index Terms—Rendering systems, volume rendering, texture mapping, splatting, antialiasing. 1

Volume Visualization is becoming an important tool for understanding large 3D data sets. A popular technique for volume rendering is known as splatting. With new hardware architectures offering substantial improvements in the performance of rendering texture mapped objects, we present textured splats. An ideal reconstruction function for 3D signals is developed which can be used as a texture map for a splat. Extensions to the basic splatting technique are then developed to additionally represent vector fields.

We examine various simple algorithms that exploit homogeneity and accumulated opacity for tracing rays through shaded volumes. Most of these methods have error criteria which allow them to trade quality for speed. The time vs. quality tradeoff for these adaptive methods is compared to fixed step multiresolution methods. These methods are also useful for general light transport in volumes. 1 Introduction We are interested in speeding volume ray tracing computations. We concentrate on the one dimensional problem of tracing a single ray, or computing the intensity at a point from a single direction. In addition to being the kernel of a simple volume ray tracer, this computation can be used to generate shadow volumes and as an element in more general light transport problems. Our data structures will be view independent to speed the production of animations of preshaded volumes and interactive viewing. In [11] Levoy introduced two key concepts which we will be expanding on: presence accel...

Abstract — This paper presents a new radiosity algorithm that allows the simultaneous computation of energy exchanges between surface elements, scattering volume distributions, and groups of surfaces, or object clusters. The new technique is based on a hierarchical formulation of the zonal method, and efficiently integrates volumes and surfaces. In particular no initial linking stage is needed, even for inhomogeneous volumes, thanks to the construction of a global spatial hierarchy. An analogy between object clusters and scattering volumes results in a powerful clustering radiosity algorithm, with no initial linking between surfaces and fast computation of average visibility information through a cluster. We show that the accurate distribution of the energy emitted or received at the cluster level can produce even better results than isotropic clustering at a marginal cost. The resulting algorithm is fast and, more importantly, truly progressive as it allows the quick calculation of approximate solutions with a smooth convergence towards very accurate simulations. I.

The 3D Image warping algorithm by McMillan and Bishop uses regular single-layered depth images (which are called reference images) as the initial input. Tears or gaps may appear in the output when the previously occluded areas are exposed in the new viewing position. Many reference images that are taken from different positions can be used to attenuate the occlusion problems but the rendering cost increases with the number of reference images. Also, combining the multiple reference images and eliminating the redundant information is a non-trivial problem. Recently, the Layered Depth Image (LDI) was proposed by Shade et al. to merge multiple reference images under a single center of projection. It tackles the occlusion problems by keeping multiple depth pixels per pixel location, while still maintaining the simplicity of warping a single reference image. However, it does not consider the issue of sampling rate. We present the LDI tree, which combines a hierarchical space partition scheme with the concept of LDI. It preserves the sampling rates of the reference images by adaptively selecting an LDI in the LDI tree for each pixel. While rendering from the LDI tree, we only have to traverse the LDI tree to the levels that are comparable to the sampling rate of the output image. We also present the progressive refinement feature and a "gap filling" algorithm by pre-filtering the LDI tree. We show that the amount of memory required is of the same order as the 2D reference images. This also bounds the complexity of rendering time to be less than directly rendering from all reference images. 1.

A new and easy-to-implement method for direct volume rendering that uses 3D texture maps for acceleration, and incorporates directional lighting, is described. The implementation, called Voltx, produces high-quality images at nearly interactive speeds on workstations with hardware support for three-dimensional texture maps. Previously reported methods did not incorporate a light model, and did not address issues of multiple texture maps for large volumes. Our research shows that these extensions impact performance by about a factor of ten. Voltx supports orthographic, perspective, and stereo views. This paper describes the theory and implementation of this technique, and compares it to the shear-warp factorization approach. A rectilinear data set is converted into a three-dimensional texture map containing color and opacity information. Quantized normal vectors and a lookup table provide efficiency. A new tesselation of the sphere is described, which serves as the basis for normal-vec...

. Most current image-based rendering methods operate under the assumption that all of the visible surfaces in the scene are opaque ideal diffuse (Lambertian) reflectors. This paper is concerned with image-based rendering of non-diffuse synthetic scenes. We introduce a new family of image-based scene representations and describe corresponding image-based rendering algorithms that are capable of handling general synthetic scenes containing not only diffuse reflectors, but also specular and glossy objects. Our image-based representation is based on layered depth images. It represents simultaneously and separately both view-independent scene information and view-dependent appearance information. The view-dependent information may be either extracted directly from our data-structures, or evaluated procedurally using an image-based analogue of ray tracing. We describe image-based rendering algorithms that recombine the two components together in a manner that produces a good approximation to...