Fast Wavelet Based Volume Rendering by Accumulation of Transparent Texture Maps

In the following paper, a new method for fast and accurate volume intensity and color integration is elaborated, which employs wavelet decompositions and texture mapping. At this point, it comprises and unifies the advantages of recently introduced Fourier domain volume rendering techniques and wavelet based volume rendering. Specifically, the method computes analytic solutions of the ray intensity integral through a single wavelet by slicing its Fourier transform and by backprojecting it into the spatial domain. The resulting slices can be considered as RGB textures where R, G, and B account for the decomposed volume color function. Due to the similarity of the basis functions, the computation of the texture map has to be figured out only once for each 3D mother wavelet. Hence, the final volume rendering procedure turns out to be a superposition of self–similar, transparent and colored textures, which is supported by modern hardware accumulation buffers. Linear shading and attenuation can be introduced by modifications of the wavelet’s Fourier transform. ___________________________________________________________________________