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