Efficient ray tracing of volume data

• Marc Levoy

  Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

抄録

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.

収録刊行物

• ACM Transactions on Graphics

  ACM Transactions on Graphics 9 (3), 245-261, 1990-07

  Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

キーワード

• Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

詳細情報

• CRID: 1363951795558785280
• NII論文ID: 30022062990
• DOI: 10.1145/78964.78965
• ISSN: 15577368
• ISSN: 07300301
• Web Site: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/78964.78965
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