Time-critical rendering for time-varying volume data

In this paper, we present a novel method to meet the time-critical requirement in rendering time-varying volume data. In time-critical rendering, the rendering is demanded to be completed in a given time budget. Our approach is modified from the differential volume rendering, which updates only the changed pixels instead of all pixels on the image plane. The level of modification (LOM) is used to measure the degree of modification of the changed data between consecutive time steps. To meet the time-critical requirement, the presented method chooses the most important changed pixels to be updated. The experimental results show that our method is very good in both controlling the rendering time to meet the time constraint and preserving the important features of a data set within a limited time budget. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.