Simple Empty-Space Removal for Interactive Volume Rendering

Interactive volume rendering methods such as texture-based slicing techniques and ray-casting have been well developed in recent years. The rendering performance is generally restricted by the volume size, the fill-rate and the texture fetch speed of the graphics hardware. For most 3D data sets, a fraction of the volume is empty, which will reduce the rendering performance without specific optimization. In this paper, we present a simple kd-tree based space partitioning scheme to efficiently remove the empty spaces from the volume data sets at the preprocessing stage. The splitting rule of the scheme is based on a simple yet effective cost function evaluated through a fast approximation of the bounding volume of the non-empty regions. The scheme culls a large number of empty voxels and encloses the remaining data with a small number of axis-aligned bounding boxes, which are then used for interactive rendering. The number of the boxes is controlled by halting criteria. In addition to it...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JGTOOLS
• Authors: Vincent Vidal 0002, Xing Mei, Philippe Decaudin
• Keywords: Interactive Volume, JGTOOLS 2008, Space Partitioning Scheme, Texture-based Slicing Techniques