A hardware architecture for video rate smooth shading of Volume data

This paper describes a new architecture for generat­ ing smoothly shaded two dimensional images of volume data. This architecture fits into an image synthesis pipeline and uses only simple arithmetic operations and a look-up table to generate two dimensional images in real time. The shading algorithm is an extensioll of the grey-level gradient algorithm for shading volume data. The shading technique produces smooth images for vox­ elized geometrical data and sampled volume data. Im­ age synthesis from volume data in real time is an impor­ tant technique in visualization and graphics systems. Additional