Smart Hardware-Accelerated Volume Rendering

For volume rendering of regular grids the display of view-plane aligned slices has proven to yield both good quality and performance. In this paper we demonstrate how to merge the most important extensions of the original 3D slicing approach, namely the pre-integration technique, volumetric clipping, and advanced lighting. Our approach allows the suppression of clipping artifacts and achieves high quality while offering the flexibility to explore volume data sets interactively with arbitrary clip objects. We also outline how to utilize the proposed volumetric clipping approach for the display of segmented data sets. Moreover, we increase the rendering quality by implementing efficient over-sampling with the pixel shader of consumer graphics accelerators. We give prove that at least 4times over-sampling is needed to reconstruct the ray integral with sufficient accuracy even with pre-integration. As an alternative to this brute-force over-sampling approach we propose a hardware-accelerated ray caster which is able to perform over-sampling only where needed and which is able to gain additional speed by early ray termination and space leaping. CR Category: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: ThreeDimensional Graphics and Realism.