Efficient volumetric ray casting for isosurface rendering

While volume rendering is becoming more widely used ill medical application s, it is still difficult to generate a good-quality image interactively wit hout expensive hardware when the size of the dataset is quire large. For in teractive rendering of a large dataset, we present an acceleration method, image-space bounding surface. Using an image-space bounding surface, the is osurface ray casting is accelerated by avoiding unnecessary volume traversa ls. Image-space bounding surface can be interactively handled by polygon-re ndering hardware even in a conventional personal computer. Two optimization techniques, LF-minmax map and memory bricking., are also employed to effic iently render isosurfaces. This paper also shows that thr algorithm can be extended to multiple isosurfaces rendering. Thr experimental results show t hat the algorithm generates a good-quality image of a large dataset interac tively on a standard PC platform (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd .