Efficient and Effective Volume Visualization with Enhanced Isosurface Rendering

1 Compared with full volume rendering, isosurface rendering has 2 several well recognized advantages in efficiency and accuracy. 3 However, standard isosurface rendering has some limitations in ef4 fectiveness. First, it uses a monotone colored approach and can 5 only visualize the geometry features of an isosurface. The lack 6 of the capability to illustrate the material property and the inter7 nal structures behind an isosurface has been a big limitation of this 8 method in applications. Another limitation of isosurface rendering 9 is the difficulty to reveal physically meaningful structures, which 10 are hidden in one or multiple isosurfaces. As such, the applica11 tion requirements of extract and recombine structures of interest 12 can not be implemented effectively with isosurface rendering. In 13 this work, we develop an enhanced isosurface rendering technique 14 to improve the effectiveness while maintaining the performance ef15 ficiency of the standard isosurface rendering. First, an isosurface 16 color enhancement method is proposed to illustrate the neighbor17 hood density and to reveal some of the internal structures. Second, 18 we extend the structure extraction capability of isosurface render19 ing by enabling explicit scene exploration within a 3D-view, us20 ing surface peeling, voxel-selecting, isosurface segmentation, and 21 multi-surface-structure visualization. Our experiments show that 22 the color enhancement not only improves the visual fidelity of the 23 rendering, but also reveals the internal structures without signifi24 cant increase of the computational cost. Explicit scene exploration 25 is also demonstrated as a powerful tool in some application scenar26 ios, such as displaying multiple abdominal organs. 27 CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image 28 Generation—Display algorithms; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: 29 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Color, shading, shad30 owing, and texture 31