On-the-Fly rendering of losslessly compressed irregular volume data

Very large irregular-grid data sets are represented as tetrahedral meshes and may incur significant disk I/O access overhead in the rendering process. An effective way to alleviate the disk I/O overhead associated with rendering large tetrahedral mesh is to reduce the I/O bandwidth requirement through compression. Existing tetrahedral mesh compression algorithms focus only on compression efficiency and cannot be readily integrated into the mesh rendering process, and thus demand that a compressed tetrahedral mesh be decompressed before it can be rendered into a 2D image. This paper presents an integrated tetrahedral mesh compression and rendering algorithm called Gatun, which allows compressed tetrahedral meshes to be rendered incrementally as they are being decompressed, thus leading to an efficient irregular grid rendering pipeline. Both compression and rendering algorithms in Gatun exploit the same local connectivity information among adjacent tetrahedra, and thus can be tightly...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: VISUALIZATION
• Authors: Chuan-Kai Yang, Tulika Mitra, Tzi-cker Chiueh
• Keywords: Large Tetrahedral Mesh, Tetrahedral Mesh, Tetrahedral Mesh Compression, Visualization, VISUALIZATION 2000