Vizar : a video rate system for volume visualization
Michael Doggett · 2022
This thesis describes a new architecture for generating two dimensional images from three dimensional volume data at video rates. The architecture has the advantage of not requiring a network or global bus thus allowing the system to be scaled to any size and take advantage of new technologies. The architecture can accept data from real time sampling devices and generate images from this data. The architecture is partitioned into five major pipeline stages that are all highly parallel. The pipeline stages of the architecture are the Coordinate Swapper, the Warp Array, the Voxel Memory, the Ray Array, and the Shading and Compositing Subsystem. The Coordinate Swapper interfaces to an input scanning device and reduces the complexity of arbitrary viewing angles to a limited range of viewing angles. The Warp Array and Ray Array are two dimensional arrays of processing elements based on a new algorithm for parallel ray casting. The Warp Array effectively rotates voxel data by shifting. The ...