Texture-enhanced Direct Volume Rendering

Direct volume rendering (DVR) is a flexible technique for visualizing and exploring scientific and biomedical volumetric data sets. Transfer functions associate field values with colors and opacities, however, for complex data are often not sufficient for encoding all relevant information. We introduce a novel visualization technique termed texture-enhanced DVR to visualize supplementary data such as material properties and additional data fields. Smooth transitions in the underlying data are represented by coherently morphing textures within user defined regions of interest. The framework seamlessly integrates into the conventional DVR process, can be executed on the GPU, is extremely powerful and flexible, and enables entirely novel visualizations.