Acceleration of template-based ray casting for volume visualization using FPGAs
Michael Dao, Todd A. Cook, D. Silver, P.S. D'Urbano · 2002
Volume visualization is used heavily to view simulated or collected data sets in such applications as medical imaging, computational fluid dynamics, and climate modeling. However, software and low-cost hardware implementations of visualization algorithms do not have sufficient performance for interactive viewing. This paper discusses methods for low-cost, hardware acceleration of volume visualization using a PC-hosted FPGA board. Our methods focus on volume rendering approaches, since these techniques are widely used and are computationally expensive; our primary method uses a template-based, ray-casting algorithm. This hardware implementation is substantially faster than a software-only version running on the host PC.