We describe a method for exploiting commodity 3D graphics hardware in
order to achieve hardware-accelerated high-quality filtering with
arbitrary filter kernels. Our approach is based on
reordering the evaluation of the filter convolution sum to
accommodate the way the hardware works. We exploit multiple
rendering passes together with the capability of current graphics
hardware to index into several textures at the same time (multi-texturing).
The method we present is applicable in one, two, and three dimensions.
The cases we are most interested in up to now are two-dimensional reconstruction
of object-aligned slices through volumetric data, and three-dimensional
reconstruction of arbitrarily oriented slices. As a fundamental building
block, the basic algorithm can be used in order to directly render an
entire volume by blending a stack of slices reconstructed with high
quality on top of each other.
We have used bicubic and tricubic B-splines and Catmull-Rom splines, as
well as windowed sinc filters, as reconstruction kernels.
However, it is important to emphasize that our approach has no fundamental
restrictions with regard to the filters that can be used.
