Institut für Visualisierung und Interaktive Systeme
Level-Of-Detail Volume Rendering via 3D Textures
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Level-Of-Detail Volume Rendering via 3D Textures
Introduction
Volume data sets most commonly occur in two fields: imaging and computational
science. 3D imaging devices continue to increase the resolution of
their sampled volumes with the current generation approaching data volumes
of 10243 samples. Similarly, computational science continues
to increase the mesh resolutions for large scale simulation thereby increasing
the size of the data to be visualized. The challenge is to provide
interactive visualization of these large 3D scalar fields.
Hardware assisted volume rendering using texture mapping can provide
interactive visualization of 3D scalar fields but the limited amount of
texture memory is a serious constraint. For data sets exceeding the limits
of physical texture memory graphics libraries often apply texture bricking
but such brute-force methods severely hamper the interactivity of the rendering.
Fortunately, most data sets have large regions that don't contain interesting
data. This paves the way for the application of multiresolution representations
of the volume data. Such representations allow regions of interest
to be rendered at higher resolutions than other parts of the data set,
allowing interactive rendering of data whose uniform grid is much larger
than texture memory. A second benefit is the reduction of trilinear
interpolations. Since coarser levels provide a filtered, more
compact, representation of the original data, resampling based upon
the level-of-detail is desirable because it reduces the number of expensive
trilinear interpolations. The problem with multiresolution methods
is the introduction of rendering artifacts when adjoining regions differ
in the level-of-detail.
We developed a method for hierarchically subdividing the data. Care
is taken to insure interpolation consistency between levels while maintaining
a minimal amount of data replication. Continuity at level boundaries can
be provided using a specific rendering scheme, which identifies and removes
the erroneously rendered regions using standard polygon clipping.
Results
The hierarchical data representation is capable of significantly reducing
the amount of texture memory used for rendering. So with only slight degragation
of image quality the interactivity can be increased noticeably. All images
show 3D texture based volume rendering of the engine data set. On
the left, the data set is displayed with full resolution. In the middle,
two different levels of detail are used with lower resolution in the back.
This reduces texture memory consumption to 57%. On the right, the
adaptive representation using four levels of detail from front-to-back
requires only 29% of the original texture memory. Here, the data set was
rendered with only 32% of the originally needed number of texture lookups.
When applying slice distances adapted to the level of data representation
partially overlapping slice polygons cause artifacts at boundaries of adjacent
bricks rendered on different level. The artifacts can be removed by determining
and clipping away the erroneously rendered regions.