Autor(es):
Marques, Ricardo 
; Santos, Luís Paulo ; Leskovsky, Peter ; Paloc, Céline
Data: 2009
Identificador Persistente: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/17833
Origem: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
Assunto(s): Volume rendering; GPU ray casting; Volume visualization
Descrição
For many applications, such as walk-throughs or terrain visualization, drawing geometric primitives is the
most efficient and effective way to represent the data. In contrast, other applications require the visualization
of data that is inherently volumetric. For example, in biomedical imaging, it might be necessary to
visualize 3D datasets obtained from CT or MRI scanners as a meaningful 2D image, in a process called
volume rendering. As a result of the popularity and usefulness of volume data, a broad class of volume
rendering techniques has emerged. Ray casting is one of these techniques. It allows for high quality volume
rendering, but is a computationally expensive technique which, with current technology, lacks interactivity
when visualizing large datasets, if processed on the CPU. The advent of efficient GPUs, available on
almost every modern workstations, combined with their high degree of programmability opens up a wide
field of new applications for the graphics cards. Ray casting is among these applications, exhibiting an
intrinsic parallelism, in the form of completely independent light rays, which allows to take advantage of
the massively parallel architecture of the GPU. This paper describes the implementation and analysis of
a set of shaders which allow interactive volume rendering on the GPU by resorting to ray casting techniques.
