ISRVT: An Interactive Spectral Rendering Visualization Tool

Images involving important optical effects, such as light dispersion, interference, diffraction and fluorescence cannot be synthesized without spectral rendering. Spectral surface reflectance curves are the surface reflectance constructed according to specific illumination models for spectral rendering. Nevertheless, it is a tedious and an inefficient job to construct spectral surface reflectance curves without any tools. In this paper, we design and implement an interactive spectral rendering visualization tool (ISRVT) by which users can interactively construct spectral surface reflectance curves through dragging a mouse on the graphical user interface. Due to the time-consuming characteristic of spectral rendering and the cos α term of the Phong illumination model, how to quickly render to meet the requirement for interactive operation is a challenge for designing ISRVT. We propose an acceleration algorithm which utilizes both the importance-driven dividing method to find better positions of tabulating intervals and a parabolic interpolation method to improve the accuracy of linear interpolation to overcome the problem of slow response. Results show that the acceleration algorithm proposed can speed up rendering with accuracy maintained. This fact makes ISRVT, which utilizes the acceleration algorithm proposed to perform well for constructing spectral surface reflectance curves.