In the past few years, volume visualization has emerged as a powerful technique for the representation, manipulation, and rendering of volume data. Unlike traditional graphics techniques, which represent 3D objects as geometric surfaces and edges commonly approximated by polygons and lines, from the volumetric point of view, volume data is considered as a set of 3D entities that may have inform...

Shear–warp volume rendering has the advantages of a moderate image quality and a fast rendering speed. However, in the case of dynamic changes in the opacity transfer function, the efficiency of memory access drops, as the method cannot exploit pre-classified volumes. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm that exploits the spatial locality of memory references for interactive classif...

For volume rendering of regular grids the display of view-plane aligned slices has proven to yield both good quality and performance. In this paper we demonstrate how to merge the most important extensions of the original 3D slicing approach, namely the pre-integration technique, volumetric clipping, and advanced lighting. Our approach allows the suppression of clipping artifacts and achieves h...

Volume rendering allows the direct visualization of scanned volume data, and can reveal vessel abnormalities more faithfully. In this overview, we will present a pipeline model for direct volume rendering systems, which focus on vascular structures. We will cover the fields of data pre-processing, classification of the volume via transfer functions, and finally rendering the volume in 2D and 3D...

The task of real time rendering of today’s volumetric datasets is still being tackled by several research groups. A quick calculation of the amount of computation required for real-time rendering of a high resolution volume puts us in the teraflop range. Yet, the demand to support such rendering capabilities is increasing due to emerging technologies such as virtual surgery simulation and rapid...

For the visualization of volume data the application of transfer functions is used widely. In this area the preintegration technique allows high quality visualizations and the application of arbitrary transfer functions. For regular grids, this approach leads to a two-dimensional pre-integration table which easily fits into texture memory. In contrast to this, unstructured meshes require a thre...

In volume rendering it is very difficult to simultaneously visualize interior and exterior structures while preserving clear shape cues. Very transparent transfer functions produce cluttered images with many overlapping structures, while clipping techniques completely remove possibly important context information. In this paper we present a new model for volume rendering, inspired by techniques...

Maximum projection is a volume rendering technique that, for each pixel, finds the maximum intensity along a projector. For certain important classes of data, this is an approximation to summation rendering which produces superior visualizations. In this paper we will show how maximum projection rendering with additional depth cues can be implemented using simple affine transformations in objec...

We extended Gross’s 3 method of volume wavelet rendering by computing splats via an orthogonal projection operator. The method decomposes the volume data into a wavelet pyramid representation in the spline domain. The splats of the basis functions are approximated on a multiresolution grid. Using least-squares approximation ensures the smallest possible error for a given sampling step size. The...

The resolution obtained in volume rendering is greatly increased over known methods through the introduction of super resolution techniques which make it possible to enlarge the view of the dataset without the introduction of unnecessary positional, gradient and opacity errors. In this paper our "Super Resolution" technique will be introduced along with a corresponding hardware design.