OpenGL volumizer: a toolkit for high quality volume rendering of large data sets

Abstract

We present the OpenGL Volumizer API for interactive, high-quality, scalable visualization of large volumetric data sets. Volumizer provides a high-level interface to OpenGL hardware to allow application writers and researchers to visualize multiple gigabytes of volumetric data. Use of multiple graphics pipes scales rendering performance and system resources including pixel-fill rate and texture memory size. Volume roaming and multi-resolution volume rendering provide alternatives for interactive visualization of volume data. We combine the concepts of roaming and multi-resolution to introduce 3D Clip-Textures, an efficient technique to visualize arbitrarily large volume data by judiciously organizing and paging them to local graphics resources from storage peripherals. Volumetric shaders provide an interface for high quality volume rendering along with implementing new visualization techniques. This paper gives an overview of the API along with a discussion of large data visualization techniques used by Volumizer.