Volume rendering

Abstract

A technique for rendering images Of volumes containing mixtures of materials is presented. The shading model allows both the interior of a material and the boundary between materials to be colored. Image projection is performed by simulating the absorption of light along the ray path to the eye. The algorithms used are designed to avoid artifacts caused by aliasing and quantization and can be efficiently implemented on an image computer. Images from a variety of applications are shown.

Cell Projection of Meshes with Non-Planar Faces

“…For data specified on a regular grid, the ray tracing is straightforward [2,3,4,5], and similar effects can be obtained with 3D textures [6]. For curvilinear or irregular grids, these methods are only applicable after the data has been resampled.…”

Virtual-Reality Based Interactive Exploration of Multiresolution Data

“…Since users cannot hold their heads perfectly still, displayed stereo images have to be updated continuously, even if the visualization itself does not change. This forbids using very costly visualization methods, e. g., high-quality volume rendering [7]. Visualization methods of choice are the ones based on graphics primitives supported by available graphics hardware, e. g., isosurfaces, streamlines or streamribbons.…”

Two methods for wavelet-based volume rendering

“…A general formulation of the volume rendering problem was provided by [7] or [14], who describe the resulting image essentially as a solution of an integral equation, the so-called volume rendering equation. In most cases, however, low-albedo approximations of the solution are sufficient and can be computed using one of the various ray-tracing schemes introduced in the past, such as [3] or [18]. Unfortunately, these types of image order methods are still computationally expensive and, hence, are not very well shaped for real-time and interactive applications.…”