9 Multi - Dimensional Transfer Functions for Volume Rendering

Direct volume-rendering has proven to be an effective and flexible visualization method for 3D scalar fields. Transfer functions are fundamental to direct volume-rendering because their role is essentially to make the data visible: by assigning optical properties like color and opacity to the voxel data, the volume can be rendered with traditional computer graphics methods. Good transfer functions reveal the important structures in the data without obscuring them with unimportant regions. To date, transfer functions have generally been limited to 1D domains, meaning that the 1D space of scalar data value has been the only variable to which opacity and color are assigned. One aspect of direct volume-rendering that has received little attention is the use of multidimen-sional transfer functions. Often, there are features of interest in volume data that are difficult to extract and visualize with 1D transfer functions. Many medical data-sets created from CT or MRI scans contain a complex combination of boundaries between multiple materials. This situation is problematic for 1D transfer functions because of the potential for overlap between the data-value intervals spanned by the different boundaries. When one data value is associated with multiple boundaries , a 1D transfer function is unable to render them in isolation. Another benefit of higher dimensional transfer functions is their ability to portray subtle variations in properties of a single boundary, such as thickness. When working with multivariate data, a similar difficulty arises with features that can be identified only by their unique combination of multiple data values. A 1D transfer function is simply not capable of capturing this relationship. Unfortunately, using multidimensional transfer functions in volume rendering is complicated. Even when the transfer function is only 1D, finding an appropriate transfer function is generally accomplished by trial and error. This is one of the main challenges in making direct volume-rendering an effective visualization tool. Adding dimensions to the transfer-function domain only compounds the problem. While this is an ongoing research area, many of the proposed methods for transfer-function generation and manipulation are not easily extended to higher-dimensional transfer functions. In addition, fast volume-rendering algorithms that assume the transfer function can be implemented as a linear lookup table (LUT) can be difficult to adapt to multidimensional transfer functions due to the linear interpolation imposed on such LUTs. This chapter provides a detailed exposition of the multidimensional transfer function concept, a generalization of multidimensional transfer functions for both scalar and …