The Multi-Dimensional Hartley Transform as a Basis for Volume Rendering

The Fast Hartley Transform (FHT), a discrete version of the Hartley Transform (HT), has been studied in various papers and shown to be faster and more convenient to implement and handle than the corresponding Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). As the HT is not as nicely separable as the Fourier Transform (FT), a multidimensional version of the HT needs to perform a final correction step to convert the result of separate HTs for each dimension into the final multi-dimensional transform. Although there exist algorithms for two and three dimensions, no generalization to arbitrary dimensions can be found in the literature. We demonstrate an easily comprehensible and efficient implementation of the fast HT and its multi-dimensional extension. By adapting this algorithm to volume rendering by the projection-slice theorem and by the use for filter analysis in frequency domain we further demonstrate the importance of the HT in this application area.