Accelerating volume rendering with texture hulls

ABSTRACT

Texture-mapping hardware has been successfully exploited for volume rendering. In this paper, we propose algorithms for texture-based volume rendering accelerated by texture hulls that avoid the transferring and compositing of empty voxels. We have developed methods that efficiently find all the bounding rectangles of the non-empty regions as well as the bounding contours that more accurately describe the borders of the non-empty regions. The bounding shapes are treated as the hulls of the non-empty sub-textures. Texels outside the hulls are skipped for storing and rendering. With our accelerations, the rendering speed is 2 to 12 times faster for a variety of data sets.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION
        I.4.10 Image Representation
            Subjects: Volumetric

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.5 Computational Geometry and Object Modeling
          Subjects: Curve, surface, solid, and object representations
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Color, shading, shadowing, and texture; Visible line/surface algorithms

General Terms:
Algorithms, Documentation, Theory

Keywords:
2D texture-based volume rendering, bounding shapes, contour simplification, empty space skipping, graphics hardware, texture hulls