Volume Rendering Techniques for General Purpose Graphics Hardware
Background
Interactive direct volume rendering has yet been restricted to high-end graphics workstations and special-purpose hardware, due to the large amount of trilinear interpolations, that are necessary to obtain high image quality. Implementations that use the 2D-texture capabilities of standard PC hardware, usually render object-aligned slices in order to substitute trilinear by bilinear interpolation. However the resulting images often contain visual artifacts caused by the lack of spatial interpolation. In this paper we propose new rendering techniques that significantly improve both performance and image quality of the 2D-texture based approach. We will show how multi-texturing capabilities of GeForce Family are exploited to enable interactive high quality volume visualization on low-cost hardware. Furthermore we demonstrate how this hardware can be used to efficiently render shaded isosurfaces and to compute diffuse illumination for semi-transparent volume rendering at interactive frame rates.
The award-winning volume rendering software is available as OpenSource project under the GNU general public license.
OpenQVis has moved to the sourceforge.net
Volume Data Set Teddy Bear (CT Scan, 128x128x62)
Volume Data Set Bonsai Tree (CT Scan,256x256x128)
Volume Data Set CT Head [large] (CT Scan,512x512x106)
Volume Data Set CT Head [small] (CT Scan,256x256x106)
Volume Data Set Engine Block (CT Scan,256x256x110)
Volume Data Set Inner Ear (CT Scan,128x128x64)
Volume Data Set MR Head (CT Scan,256x256x256)
Volume Data Set Temporal Bone (CT Scan,512x512x128)
Papers
| · | Klaus Engel, Markus Hadwiger, Joe Kniss, Christof Rezk-Salama, Daniel Weiskopf |
| Real-Time Volume Graphics | |
| In AK Peters, 2006,ISBN: 1-56881-266-3 | |
| [bib] |
| · | Christof Rezk-Salama |
| Volume Rendering Techniques for General Purpose Graphics Hardware | |
| In PhD Thesis , Computer Science Department, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2002 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | Christof Rezk-Salama, Andreas Kolb |
| Opacity Peeling for Direct Volume Rendering | |
| In in Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. Eurographics), 25(3), 2006, pages 597-606 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | Klaus Engel, Markus Hadwiger, Joe M. Kniss, Christof Rezk-Salama |
| Real-Time Volume Graphics, Tutorial Notes | |
| In Eurographics Tutorials, 2006 | |
| [bib] |
| · | Christof Rezk-Salama |
| Volumenvisualisierung auf handelsüblicher Grafik-Hardware | |
| In in it - information Technology, 47(1), 2005, pages 54-56 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | K. Engel, M. Hadwiger, J. Kniss, A. Lefohn, C. Rezk-Salama, D. Weiskopf |
| Real-Time Volume Graphics, SIGGRAPH Course Notes 28 | |
| In ACM SIGGRAPH, 2004 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |
| · | J. Kniss, G. Kindlmann, M. Hadwiger, C. Rezk-Salama, R. Westermann |
| High-Quality Volume Graphics on Consumer PC Hardware | |
| In ACM SIGGRAPH Course Notes 42, 2002 | |
| [bib] |
| · | C. Rezk-Salama, K. Engel, M. Bauer, G. Greiner, T- Ertl |
| Interactive Volume Rendering on Standard PC Graphics Hardware Using Multi-Textures and Multi-Stage Rasterization | |
| In in Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware, 2000 | |
| [bib] [pdf] |