Iso-contour volume rendering

Abstract

In this paperwe presenta new approach to volume rendering in which curves of constant intensity in image space,or iso-contours, are computed directly for eachview. The generated iso-contours can be used to drive various visualization and feature-detection algorithms. The approach imposes no restriction on the organization of the data points and can accommodatea large class of radially-symmetric filter functions. The technique works well for both perspective and orthographic viewing projections. Each iso-contour is definedby an ordinary differential equation, which is solved numerically using a predictor-corrector method. A key element of the algorithm is the use of image intensity gradients, which we computeby means of a closedform expression that holds at every point on the image plane. A caching algorithm is described that dramatically accelerates the gradient computations on large datasets. The algorithm is demonstrated on emission-only datasets. We conclude by describing a number of possible enhancements.