Hardware assisted multichannel volume rendering

Abstract

We explore real time volume rendering of multichannel data for volumes with color and multimodal information. We demonstrate volume rendering of the visible human male color dataset and photorealistic rendering of voxelized terrains, and achieve high quality visualizations. We render multimodal volumes utilizing hardware programmability for accumulation level mixing, and use CT and MRI information as examples. We also use multiboard parallel/distributed rendering schemes for large datasets and investigate scalability issues. We employ the VolumePro 1000 for real time multichannel volume rendering. Our approach, however, is not hardware-specific and can use commodity texture hardware instead.