8,526 research outputs found
VolumeEVM: A new surface/volume integrated model
Volume visualization is a very active research area in the field of scien-tific
visualization. The Extreme Vertices Model (EVM) has proven to be
a complete intermediate model to visualize and manipulate volume data
using a surface rendering approach. However, the ability to integrate the
advantages of surface rendering approach with the superiority in visual exploration
of the volume rendering would actually produce a very complete
visualization and edition system for volume data. Therefore, we decided
to define an enhanced EVM-based model which incorporates the volumetric
information required to achieved a nearly direct volume visualization
technique. Thus, VolumeEVM was designed maintaining the same EVM-based
data structure plus a sorted list of density values corresponding to
the EVM-based VoIs interior voxels. A function which relates interior
voxels of the EVM with the set of densities was mandatory to be defined.
This report presents the definition of this new surface/volume integrated
model based on the well known EVM encoding and propose implementations
of the main software-based direct volume rendering techniques
through the proposed model.Postprint (published version
Accelerated High-Resolution Photoacoustic Tomography via Compressed Sensing
Current 3D photoacoustic tomography (PAT) systems offer either high image
quality or high frame rates but are not able to deliver high spatial and
temporal resolution simultaneously, which limits their ability to image dynamic
processes in living tissue. A particular example is the planar Fabry-Perot (FP)
scanner, which yields high-resolution images but takes several minutes to
sequentially map the photoacoustic field on the sensor plane, point-by-point.
However, as the spatio-temporal complexity of many absorbing tissue structures
is rather low, the data recorded in such a conventional, regularly sampled
fashion is often highly redundant. We demonstrate that combining variational
image reconstruction methods using spatial sparsity constraints with the
development of novel PAT acquisition systems capable of sub-sampling the
acoustic wave field can dramatically increase the acquisition speed while
maintaining a good spatial resolution: First, we describe and model two general
spatial sub-sampling schemes. Then, we discuss how to implement them using the
FP scanner and demonstrate the potential of these novel compressed sensing PAT
devices through simulated data from a realistic numerical phantom and through
measured data from a dynamic experimental phantom as well as from in-vivo
experiments. Our results show that images with good spatial resolution and
contrast can be obtained from highly sub-sampled PAT data if variational image
reconstruction methods that describe the tissues structures with suitable
sparsity-constraints are used. In particular, we examine the use of total
variation regularization enhanced by Bregman iterations. These novel
reconstruction strategies offer new opportunities to dramatically increase the
acquisition speed of PAT scanners that employ point-by-point sequential
scanning as well as reducing the channel count of parallelized schemes that use
detector arrays.Comment: submitted to "Physics in Medicine and Biology
Distributed-memory parallelization of an explicit time-domain volume integral equation solver on Blue Gene/P
Two distributed-memory schemes for efficiently parallelizing the explicit marching-on in-time based solution of the time domain volume integral equation on the IBM Blue Gene/P platform are presented. In the first scheme, each processor stores the time history of all source fields and only the computationally dominant step of the tested field computations is distributed among processors. This scheme requires all-to-all global communications to update the time history of the source fields from the tested fields. In the second scheme, the source fields as well as all steps of the tested field computations are distributed among processors. This scheme requires sequential global communications to update the time history of the distributed source fields from the tested fields. Numerical results demonstrate that both schemes scale well on the IBM Blue Gene/P platform and the memory efficient second scheme allows for the characterization of transient wave interactions on composite structures discretized using three million spatial elements without an acceleration algorithm
Volume rendering with multidimensional peak finding
Journal ArticlePeak finding provides more accurate classification for direct volume rendering by sampling directly at local maxima in a transfer function, allowing for better reproduction of high-frequency features. However, the 1D peak finding technique does not extend to higherdimensional classification. In this work, we develop a new method for peak finding with multidimensional transfer functions, which looks for peaks along the image of the ray. We use piecewise approximations to dynamically sample in transfer function space between world-space samples. As with unidimensional peak finding, this approach is useful for specifying transfer functions with greater precision, and for accurately rendering noisy volume data at lower sampling rates. Multidimensional peak finding produces comparable image quality with order-of-magnitude better performance, and can reproduce features omitted entirely by standard classification. With no precomputation or storage requirements, it is an attractive alternative to preintegration for multidimensional transfer functions
Interactive deformation and visualization of level set surfaces using graphics hardware
Journal ArticleDeformable isosurfaces, implemented with level-set methods, have demonstrated a great potential in visualization for applications such as segmentation, surface processing, and surface reconstruction. Their usefulness has been limited, however, by their high computational cost and and reliance on significant parameter tuning. This paper presents a solution to these challenges by describing graphics processor (GPU) based algorithms for solving and visualizing levelset solutions at interactive rates. Our efficient GPU-based solution relies on packing the level-set isosurface data into a dynamic, sparse texture format. As the level set moves, this sparse data structure is updated via a novel GPU to CPU message passing scheme. When the level-set solver is integrated with a real-time volume renderer operating on the same packed format, a user can visualize and steer the deformable level-set surface as it evolves. In addition, the resulting isosurface can serve as a region-of-interest specifier for the volume renderer. This paper demonstrates the capabilities of this technology for interactive volume visualization and segmentation
Interactive Visualization of the Largest Radioastronomy Cubes
3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool,
however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a
challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution
to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by
utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the
data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering
workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate
images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume
output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky
Survey (HIPASS - 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS - 26
GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework's performance. The
framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time < 0.3 second
with 1024 x 1024 pixels output resolution using 3 rendering workstations and 8
GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte
order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, Accepted New Astronomy July 201
Ubiquitous volume rendering in the web platform
176 p.The main thesis hypothesis is that ubiquitous volume rendering can be achieved using WebGL. The thesis enumerates the challenges that should be met to achieve that goal. The results allow web content developers the integration of interactive volume rendering within standard HTML5 web pages. Content developers only need to declare the X3D nodes that provide the rendering characteristics they desire. In contrast to the systems that provide specific GPU programs, the presented architecture creates automatically the GPU code required by the WebGL graphics pipeline. This code is generated directly from the X3D nodes declared in the virtual scene. Therefore, content developers do not need to know about the GPU.The thesis extends previous research on web compatible volume data structures for WebGL, ray-casting hybrid surface and volumetric rendering, progressive volume rendering and some specific problems related to the visualization of medical datasets. Finally, the thesis contributes to the X3D standard with some proposals to extend and improve the volume rendering component. The proposals are in an advance stage towards their acceptance by the Web3D Consortium
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