Hardware and software improvements of volume splatting

This paper proposes different hardware-based acceleration of the three classical splatting strategies: emph{composite-every-sample}, emph{object-space sheet-buffer} and emph{image-space sheet-buffer}.Preprin

Image-space sheet-buffered splatting on the GPU

Image-Space Sheet-Buffered Splatting is a popular high quality volume-rendering technique specially suitable for zoomed views of the data. On the contrary to other splatting approaches, it processes the voxels in slabs perpendicular to the viewing direction. Recently, a GPU design of this method has been proposed that considerably accelerates the rendering stage. However, the bottleneck of the method is the computation of the buckets, i.e the structure handling the voxels to be rendered in each slab. This stage of the method is done on the CPU. In this paper, we propose a new design of the method that creates and manages the buckets on the GPU. The proposed method is more than twice faster than the previous ones.Postprint (published version

Frame-to-frame coherent image-aligned sheet-buffered splatting

Splatting is a classical volume rendering technique that has recently gained in popularity for the visualization of point-based suface models. Up to now, there has been few publications on its adaptation to time-varying data. In this paper, we propose a novel frame-to-frame coherent view-aligned sheet-buffer splatting of time-varying data, that tries to reduce as much as possible the memory load and the rendering computations taking into account the similarity in the data and in the images at successive instants of time. The results presented in the paper are encouraging and show that the proposed technique may be useful to explore data through time.Postprint (published version

Real-time slicing of data space

Abstract This can be a costly operation. When the data is arranged Real-time rendering of iso-contour surfaces is problematic for large complex data sets. In this paper, an algorithm is presented that allows very rapid representation of an interval set surrounding a iso-contour surface. The algorithm draws upon three main ideas. A fast indexing scheme is used to select only those data points near the contour surface. Hardware assisted splatting is then employed on these data points to produce a volume rendering of the interval set. Finally, by shifting a small window through the indexing scheme or data space, animated volumes are produced showing the changing contour values. In addition to allowing fast selection and rendering of the data, the indexing scheme allows a much compressed representation of the data by eliminating "noise" data points