Transform Coding for Hardware-accelerated Volume Rendering

Hardware-accelerated volume rendering using the GPU is now the standard approach for real-time volume rendering, although limited graphics memory can present a problem when rendering large volume data sets. Volumetric compression in which the decompression is coupled to rendering has been shown to be an effective solution to this problem; however, most existing techniques were developed in the context of software volume rendering, and all but the simplest approaches are prohibitive in a real-time hardware-accelerated volume rendering context. In this paper we present a novel block-based transform coding scheme designed specifically with real-time volume rendering in mind, such that the decompression is fast without sacrificing compression quality. This is made possible by consolidating the inverse transform with dequantization in such a way as to allow most of the reprojection to be precomputed. Furthermore, we take advantage of the freedom afforded by offline compression in order to o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: VIS
• Authors: Nathaniel Fout, Kwan-Liu Ma
• Keywords: IEEE Visualization, Real-time Volume, Transform Coding Scheme, VIS 2007, Visualization, Volume Rendering Context