Journal of Applied Sciences ›› 2009, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (2): 167-171.

• Signal and Information Processing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Accelerating GPU-Based Volume Rendering in Conjunction with Surface Rendering

  

  1. Laboratory of Image Science and Technology, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China
  • Received:2008-07-19 Revised:2008-11-06 Online:2009-04-01 Published:2009-04-01

Abstract:

An improved GPU-based volume rendering method is presented for interactive visualization of image datasets. The closed 3D surface that warps the user-interested datapart is created using a 2D contour-based surface
rendering algorithm. The 3D surface is then used as proxy geometry for GPU-based ray-casting to achieve fast
volume rendering. With the rendering of proxy geometry, the number and sampling length of rays are reduced, and the ray-casting time saved. We implement the method on medical and industrial datasets, showing improvement of efficiency without any loss of interested dataparts.

Key words: volume rendering, graphic processing unit, ray-casting

CLC Number: