Binary Volume Rendering using the Slice-based Binary Shell

This paper presents a new data structure, Slice-based Binary Shell (SBS), for efficient manipulation and rendering of binary volume data. Since SBS stores only surface voxels with selected attributes of the voxels in a slice-based data structure that allows direct access to the voxels, it shows high storage and computational efficiency. This efficiency becomes more prominent when representing multiple binary objects. We also present an efficient rendering algorithm for SBS. The algorithm, based on the shear-warp technique, provides high-speed interactive rendering for binary volumes of many objects on a PC with no specialized hardware.