Gigabyte Volume Viewing Using Split Software/Hardware Interpolation

Abstract

This paper describes an application for viewing large volumes of 3D seismic data. The program can display arbitrarily oriented viewing objects situated in gigabyte sized data sets. Using a novel interpolation technique combined with level of detail volumes, data caches, BSP trees and other graphical tricks, interactive frame rates better than 15 frames/second can be achieved (depending on the size of the viewing object). This paper describes most of these techniques in some detail, but the main theme of the paper is the novel interpolation method. This method splits tri-linear interpolation between software and hardware. This method was implemented to use multi-threading on multiprocessor machines to further improve frame rates. The combination of multi-threaded input of data in combination with a data cache allows the program to run on machines that have smaller RAM than the size of volume.