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

Frequently, data in scientific computing is in its abstract form a finite point set in space, and it is sometimes useful or required to compute what one might call the "shape" of the set. For that purpose, this paper introduces the formal notion of the family of ff-shapes of a finite point set in R³. Each shape is a well-defined polytope, derived from the Delaunay triangulation of the point set, with a parameter ff 2 IR controlling the desired level of detail. An algorithm is presented that constructs the entire family of shapes for a given set of size n in time O(n²), worst case. A robust implementation of the algorithm is discussed and several applications in the area of scientific computing are mentioned.

Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing sampled scalar or vector fields of three spatial dimensions without fitting geometric primitives to the data. A subset of these techniques generates images by computing 2-D projections of a colored semitransparent volume, where the color and opacity at each point are derived from the data using local operators. Since all voxels participate in the generation of each image, rendering time grows linearly with the size of the dataset. This paper presents a front-to-back image-order volume-rendering algorithm and discusses two techniques for improving its performance. The first technique employs a pyramid of binary volumes to encode spatial coherence present in the data, and the second technique uses an opacity threshold to adaptively terminate ray tracing. Although the actual time saved depends on the data, speedups of an order of magnitude have been observed for datasets of useful size and complexity. Examples from two applications are given: medical imaging and molecular graphics.

One method of directly rendering a three-dimensional volume of scalar data is to project each cell in a volume onto the screen. Rasterizing a volume cell is more complex than rasterizing a polygon. A method is presented that approximates tetrahedral volume cells with hardware renderable transparent triangles. This method produces results which are visually similar to more exact methods for scalar volume rendering, but is faster and has smaller memory requirements. The method is best suited for display of smoothlychanging data. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.0 [Computer Graphics]: General; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling. Additional Key Words and Phrases: Volume rendering, scientific visualization. 1 Introduction Display of three-dimensional scalar volumes has recently become an active area of research. A scalar volume is described by some function f(x; y; z) defined over some region R of three-dimensional space. In many scientific ap...

This tutorial survey paper reviews several different models for light interaction with volume densities of absorbing, glowing, reflecting, and/or scattering material. They are, in order of increasing realism, absorption only, emission only, emission and absorption combined, single scattering of external illumination without shadows, single scattering with shadows, and multiple scattering. For each model I give the physical assumptions, describe the applications for which it is appropriate, derive the differential or integral equations for light transport, present calculations methods for solving them, and show output images for a data set representing a cloud. Special attention is given to calculation methods for the multiple scattering model.

Although direct volume rendering is a powerful tool for visualizing complex structures within volume data, the size and complexity of the parameter space controlling the rendering process makes generating an informative rendering challenging. In particular, the specification of the transfer function --- the mapping from data values to renderable optical properties --- is frequently a time-consuming and unintuitive task. Ideally, the data being visualized should itself suggest an appropriate transfer function that brings out the features of interest without obscuring them with elements of little importance. We demonstrate that this is possible for a large class of scalar volume data, namely that where the regions of interest are the boundaries between different materials. A transfer function which makes boundaries readily visible can be generated from the relationship between three quantities: the data value and its first and second directional derivatives along the gradient direction. ...

We propose a new rendering technique that produces 3-D images with enhanced visual comprehensibility. Shape fea-tures can be readily understood if certain geometric proper-ties are enhanced. To achieve this, we develop drawing algo-rithms for discontinuities, edges, contour lines, and curved hatching. All of them are realized with 2-D image process-ing operations instead of line tracking processes, so that they can be efficiently combined with conventional surface rendering algorithms. Data about the geometric properties of the surfaces are preserved as Geometric Buffers (G-buffers). Each G-buffer contains one geometric property such as the depth or the normal vector of each pixel. By using G-buffers as interme-diate results, artificial enhancement processes are separated from geometric processes (projection and hidden surface re-moval) and physical processes (shading and texture map-ping), and performed as postprocesses. This permits a user to rapidly examine various combinations of enhancement techniques without excessive recompntation, and easily ob-tain the most comprehensible image. Our method can be widely applied for various purposes. Several of these, edge enhancement, line drawing illustra-tions, topographical maps, medical imaging, and surface analysis, are presented in this paper.

Recent research has demonstrated the usefulness of implicit surfaces for modeling geometric objects. The interactive design of such surfaces has not, however, received the same attention as has the design of parametric surfaces. Principally this is due to the difficulty of controlling the shape of implicit surfaces while displaying the changes quickly enough for use within an interactive design environment. This paper describes progress towards interactive control of implicit surfaces and introduces new techniques useful to the designer.

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.