Efficient Parallel Computation of Projections for Animated Volume Visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we parallelize a new efficient approximate projection algorithm for volume rendering. The algorithm is unique in that it computes N different views simultaneously, much faster than these projections could be computed independently. It is thus ideal for computing animated sequences of views. We implement and evaluate the algorithm on a MasPar MP-1. We render a 128x128x128 data set at up to 21 frames per second average on a 1K PE MasPar MP-1 using gray scale volumetric compositing (simpler transformations are computed even faster).