Multi-Frame Rate Volume Rendering

This paper presents multi-frame rate volume rendering, an asynchronous approach to parallel volume rendering. The workload is distributed over multiple GPUs in such a way that the main display device can provide high frame rates and little latency to user input, while one or multiple backend GPUs asynchronously provide new views. The latency artifacts inherent to such a solution are minimized by forward image warping. Volume rendering, especially in medical applications, often involves the visualization of transparent objects. Former multi-frame rate rendering systems addressed this poorly, because an intermediate representation consisting of a single surface lacks the ability to preserve motion parallax. The combination of volume raycasting with feature peeling yields an image-based representation that is simultaneously suitable for high quality reconstruction and for fast rendering of transparent datasets. Moreover, novel methods for trading excess speed for visual quality are introduced, and strategies for balancing quality versus speed during runtime are described. A performance evaluation section provides details on possible application scenarios.