20 years of volume rendering
Miloš Šrámek · 2006
In the year 2007 we celebrate the 20-th anniversary of coining the notion of volume rendering, followed by its first "official" usage in the papers by Levoy and by Drebin, Carpenter and Hanrahan in 1988. The new and revolutionary introduced by these papers was the possibility to visualize objects represented by discrete three-dimensional scalar fields---usually tomographic scans---without the necessity to fit any surface models to the objects represented therein. This new approach conceptually simplified sequence of the required rendering operations---the rendering pipeline, and enabled to keep the important connection between the original three-dimensional input data and the final renditions. Thus, a possibility of high quality rendering of complex structures emerged, not limited just to objects with well defined surfaces but also to those with diffused, blurred and weakly defined boundaries in general.