Volume Rendering Acceleration by using Object Boundary Projection and Parallel Processing

Abstract

〈 Summary 〉 Acceleration methods based on bounding volumes have been widely recognized as an efficient approach for diminishing volume rendering time by eliminating unnecessary computations. Objects inside the volume data are enclosed by various shapes in order to delimit the range for volume rendering, thus avoiding unnecessary calculation. This paper presents an approach for accelerating pure software-based volume rendering by using object boundary projection and parallel processing techniques. Object boundary projection is a variant of the bounding volume method and works by extracting the tight object boundary information and projecting it onto the image space plane in order to obtain the effective range, both in image and object space for efficient volume rendering. We optimized the original object boundary projection algorithm and added other facilities such as macro-cell projection and parallel processing. An efficient load-balancing scheme for image-space data distribution which takes into consideration the boundary information is also presented and these were evaluated on a distributed-memory parallel architecture machine. We obtained some encouraging results which show the effectiveness of this acceleration approach by diminishing volume rendering time without sacrificing the rendered image quality.