High-Quality Interactive Volume Rendering on Standard PC Graphics Hardware

We propose an interactive volume rendering method using flexible texture mapping capability of standard PC graphics hardware. Although volume rendering is computationally expensive, interactive visualization can be achieved by slice-based method in which volume data set is represented as a stack of polygonal slices and rendered by texture mapping and α-blending function accelerated by graphics hardware. One of the drawbacks in sliced-based method is that insufficient interpolation leads to severe visual artifacts, which can be successfully eliminated by inserting intermediate slices which are effectively generated using multi-texture function. Another problem is the limitation of data size due to the limitation of the amount of video memory. We introduce adaptive 2 3N-blocking to enable both drastic decimation and interactive processing of volume data, and show high-quality interactive volume rendering can be performed on standard PC graphics hardware.