Shell rendering with hardware-supported data extraction
Bjoern Olstad, Erik Normann Steen, Olav Sandstaa · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
A general framework for fast visualization of multispectral volume data is presented. Dedicated hardware with a non-numeric coprocessor is utilized in the first step of the rendering pipeline to process the volume data and extract voxels according to feature characteristics. This capability is used to select voxels according to automatic classification results or real-time descriptions of regions of interest supplied by the user in an interactive environment. By this step we can in real-time reduce the number of voxels that have to be considered in the rendering and increase the speed of the volume rendering accordingly. The selected voxels are generated in a front-to-back (or back-to-front) order and projected to the view plane where a 3D rendering is accumulated with an adaptation of the shell rendering technique proposed by Udupa and Odhner. The paper includes an overview of the underlying hardware architecture and presents numerical experiments with a software simulator.