AN EFFICIENT VOLUME-RENDERING ALGORITHM WITH AN ANALYTIC APPROACH

We present a new approach, analytic isosurface rendering, for volume r endering. The isosurface of a cell can be modeled as an analytic funct ion, and the intersection between a ray and the isosurface can be comp uted directly. An octree structure efficiently searches the cells cont aining isosurfaces. The octree is easy to implement and can be stored in a compact form. It needs extra memory space - at most 27/64 of the size of the original data volume. Front-to-back projection can easily be implemented under the octree structure. A union-find-based algorith m maintains the frame buffer efficiently. Experimental results show th at a volume rendering program with our approach is very efficient and maintains the quality of the rendered images.