Fast Surface Rendering Of Volumetric Data
Balázs Csébfalvi, Andreas König, Eduard M. Groller · 2000
In this paper a new direct volume-rendering method is presented for fast display of iso-surfaces. In order to reduce the data to be processed, the algorithm eliminates those voxels which are invisible from a specific domain of viewing directions. The remaining surface points are stored in an appropriate data structure optimized for fast shear-warp projection. The proposed data structure also supports the application of cutting planes in order to visualize the internal part of the volume as well. Unlike many other surfaceoriented techniques, the presented method does not trade image quality for speed. It does not require any specialized hardware either to achieve interactive frame rates, thus it can be widely used in medical imaging applications even on low end hardware. 1 Introduction There are two fundamentally different categories of volume visualization techniques. Indirect methods, like the classical marching-cubes [1] surface-reconstruction algorithm build a geometrical represen...