Ray Casting of Multiple Multi-Resolution Volume Datasets

Abstract

We developed a GPU-based volume ray casting system for rendering multiple arbitrarily overlapping multi-resolution volume data sets. Our efficient volume virtualization scheme is based on shared resource management, which can simultaneously deal with a large number of multi-gigabyte volumes. BSP volume decomposition of the bounding boxes of the cube-shaped volumes is used to identify the overlapping and non-overlapping volume regions. The resulting volume fragments are extracted from the BSP tree in front-to-back order for rendering. The BSP tree needs to be updated only if individual volumes are moved, which is a significant advantage over costly depth peeling procedures or approaches that use sorting on the octree brick level.

Papers and Documents

  • Lux, C., Fröhlich, B.
    GPU-based Ray Casting of Multiple Multi-Resolution Volume Datasets
    In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Visual Computing, LNCS vol. 5876, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 104-116, November 2009.
    [preprint]