Interactive ray tracing for volume visualization

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 5; no. 3; pp. 238 - 250
• Main Authors: Parker, S., Parker, M., Livnat, Y., Sloan, P.-P., Hansen, C., Shirley, P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-07-1999
• Subjects: Color; Computational efficiency; Computer vision; Data visualization; Flat panel displays; Graphics; Hardware; Hierarchies; Interactive; Isosurfaces; Optimization; Pixels; Ray tracing; Rendering (computer graphics); Scalability; Visualization
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/2945.795215

Presents a brute-force ray-tracing system for interactive volume visualization. The system runs on a conventional (distributed) shared-memory multiprocessor machine. For each pixel, we trace a ray through a volume to compute the color for that pixel. Although this method has a high intrinsic computational cost, its simplicity and scalability make it ideal for large data sets on current high-end parallel systems. To gain efficiency, several optimizations are used, including a volume bricking scheme and a shallow data hierarchy. These optimizations are used in three separate visualization algorithms: isosurfacing of rectilinear data, isosurfacing of unstructured data, and maximum-intensity projection on rectilinear data. The system runs interactively (i.e. at several frames per second) on an SGI Reality Monster. The graphics capabilities of the Reality Monster are used only for display of the final color image.