It is evident that more and more video data is being generated everyday, for example, by TV broadcast companies and security cameras. However, whilst we are overwhelmed by the huge amount of imagery data, machine vision is generally not yet ready to replace us in most of the everyday visual tasks. In this paper we present a novel approach to the handling of video data. We propose to employ volu...

Real-time graphics hardware is rapidly becoming programmable, and has recently incorporated the features needed for direct volume rendering. Unfortunately, the standard interfaces to this hardware are at the assembly language level. When programming at this level, it is difficult re-use and modify existing implementations of volume rendering algorithms, and it is extremely tedious to experiment...

Smoke is a leading cause of death in fire. To minimize the potential harm from the smoke hazards in the course of a fire, a rational virtual reality (VR)-based fire training simulator taking full account of the various aspects of smoke hazards has been developed and is described herein. In this simulator, a visualization technique based on volume rendering and fire dynamics data has been especi...

The interpretation of 3D scalar fields is considerably difficult because of their intrinsic complexity. In the context of this thesis the term volume rendering refers to the visualization of static 3D scalar fields especially the 3D imaging in medicine. A variety of different approaches have been developed in the past decades for volume rendering. This chapter tries to assess different volume r...

We present a new algorithm here for efficient incremental rendering of volumetric datasets. The primary goal of this algorithm is to give average workstations the ability to efficiently render volume data received over relatively low bandwidth network links in such a way that rapid user feedback is maintained. Common limitations of workstation rendering of volume data include: large memory over...

Object-order texture-based volume rendering decomposes the volume data set into stacks of textured polygons. The performance of such hardwarebased volume rendering techniques is clearly dominated by the fill-rate and the memory bandwidth, while only very little workload is assigned to the vertex processor. In this paper we discuss a vertex program which efficiently computes the slicing for text...

Interactive volume rendering in its standard formulation has become an increasingly important tool in many application domains. In recent years several advanced volumetric illumination techniques to be used in interactive scenarios have been proposed. These techniques claim to have perceptual benefits as well as being capable of producing more realistic volume rendered images. Naturally, they c...

We present the concept of volumetric depth-peeling. The proposed method is conceived to render interior and exterior iso-surfaces for a fixed iso-value and to blend them without the need to render the volume multiple times. The main advantage of our method over pre-integrated volume rendering is the ability to extract arbitrarily many iso-layers for the given iso-value. Up to now, pre-integrate...

Octrees are attractive data structures for rendering of volumes, as they provide simultaneously uniform and hierarchical data encapsulation. They have been successfully applied to compression, simplification, and extraction as well as rendering itself. This paper surveys and compares existing works employing octrees for volume rendering. It focuses specifically on extraction, direct volume rend...

We present multi attribute texture transfer functions for the generation of seismic illustrations. We render seismic data in the style of geological textbook illustrations by combining illustratively rendered axis aligned slices with volume rendering. We have extended the transfer function concept to map volume attributes to 2D textures that flow according to a deformation volume describing the...