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Instant Volume Visualization using Maximum Intensity Difference Accumulation
Author(s) -
Bruckner Stefan,
Gröller M. Eduard
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01474.x
Subject(s) - computer science , volume rendering , rendering (computer graphics) , visualization , maximum intensity projection , transfer function , projection (relational algebra) , computer graphics (images) , volume (thermodynamics) , usability , computational science , artificial intelligence , algorithm , human–computer interaction , medicine , physics , surgery , quantum mechanics , angiography , electrical engineering , engineering
It has long been recognized that transfer function setup for Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) is crucial to its usability. However, the task of finding an appropriate transfer function is complex and time‐consuming even for experts. Thus, in many practical applications simpler techniques which do not rely on complex transfer functions are employed. One common example is Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP) which depicts the maximum value along each viewing ray. In this paper, we introduce Maximum Intensity Difference Accumulation (MIDA), a new approach which combines the advantages of DVR and MIP. Like MIP, MIDA exploits common data characteristics and hence does not require complex transfer functions to generate good visualization results. It does, however, feature occlusion and shape cues similar to DVR. Furthermore, we show that MIDA – in addition to being a useful technique in its own right – can be used to smoothly transition between DVR and MIP in an intuitive manner. MIDA can be easily implemented using volume raycasting and achieves real‐time performance on current graphics hardware.