Skip to search boxSkip to navigationSkip to main content

Octree rasterization: accelerating high-quality out-of-core GPU volume rendering

  • Baoquan Liu
    ,
  • Gordon Clapworthy
    ,
  • Feng Dong
    ,
  • Edmond C. Prakash
Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Abstract

We present a novel approach for GPU-based high quality volume rendering of large out-of-core volume data. By focusing on the locations and costs of ray traversal, we are able to significantly reduce the rendering time over traditional algorithms. We store a volume in an octree (of bricks); in addition, every brick is further split into regular macro-cells. Our solutions move the branch-intensive accelerating structure traversal out of the GPU raycasting loop and introduce an efficient empty-space culling method by rasterizing the proxy geometry of a view-dependent cut of the octree nodes. This rasterization pass can capture all of the bricks that the ray penetrates in a per-pixel list. Since the per-pixel list is captured in a front-to-back order, our raycasting pass needs only to cast rays inside the tighter ray segments. As a result, we achieve two levels of empty space skipping: the brick level and the macro-cell level. During evaluation and testing, this technique achieved 2 to 4 times faster rendering speed than a current state-of-the-art algorithm across a variety of data sets.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 1732

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Volume 19, Issue 10)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 10/08/2012

Publication status

Published - 10/08/2012

ISSN

1077-2626

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/250934
  • Scopus: 84883128137

Access to documents

Publication metrics