Design of Multi-dimensional Transfer Functions Using Dimensional Reduction

Direct volume rendering techniques allow visualization of volume data without extracting intermediate geometry. The mapping from voxel attributes to optical properties is performed by transfer functions which, consequently, play a crucial role in building informative images from the data. One-dimensional transfer functions, which are based only on a scalar value per voxel, often do not provide proper visualizations. On the other hand, multidimensional transfer functions can perform more sophisticated data classification, based on vectorial voxel signatures. The transfer function design is a non-trivial and unintuitive task, especially in the multi-dimensional case. In this paper we propose a multi-dimensional transfer function design technique that uses self-organizing maps to perform dimensional reduction. Our approach gives uniform treatment to volume data containing voxel signatures of arbitrary dimension, and allows the use of any type of voxel attribute as part of the voxel signatures.