FastSplats: optimized splatting on rectilinear grids

Splatting is widely applied in many areas, including volume, point-based, and image-based rendering. Improvements to splatting, such as eliminating popping and color bleeding, occlusion-based acceleration, post-rendering classification and shading, have all been recently accomplished. These improvements share a common need for efficient framebuffer accesses. We present an optimized software splatting package, using a newly designed primitive, called FastSplat, to scan-convert footprints. Our approach does not use texture mapping hardware, but supports the whole pipeline in memory. In such an integrated pipeline, we are then able to study the optimization strategies and address image quality issues. While this research is meant for a study of the inherent trade-off of splatting, our renderer, purley in software, achieves 3 to 5 times speedups over a top-end texture hardware (for opaque data sets) implementation. We further propose a way of efficient occlusion culling using a summed are...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: VISUALIZATION
• Authors: Jian Huang, Roger Crawfis, Naeem Shareef, Klaus Mueller
• Keywords: Efficient Framebuffer Accesses, Software Splatting Package, Texture Mapping Hardware, Visualization, VISUALIZATION 2000