Stochastic Volume Rendering of Multi‐Phase SPH Data

In this paper, we present a novel method for the direct volume rendering of large smoothed‐particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation data without transforming the unstructured data to an intermediate representation. By directly visualizing the unstructured particle data, we avoid long preprocessing times and large storage requirements. This enables the visualization of large, time‐dependent, and multivariate data both as a post‐process and in situ. To address the computational complexity, we introduce stochastic volume rendering that considers only a subset of particles at each step during ray marching. The sample probabilities for selecting this subset at each step are thereby determined both in a view‐dependent manner and based on the spatial complexity of the data. Our stochastic volume rendering enables us to scale continuously from a fast, interactive preview to a more accurate volume rendering at higher cost. Lastly, we discuss the visualization of free‐surface and multi‐phase flows by including a multi‐material model with volumetric and surface shading into the stochastic volume rendering.     

3DIVE: An Immersive Environment for Interactive Volume Data Exploration

This paper describes an immersive system,called 3DIVE,for interactive volume data visualization and exploration inside the CAVE virtual environment.Combining interactive volume rendering and virtual reality provides a netural immersive environment for volumetric data visualization.More advanced data exploration operations,such as object level data manipulation,simulation and analysis ,are supported in 3DIVE by several new techniques,In particular,volume primitives and texture regions ae used for the rendering,manipulation,and collision detection of volumetric objects;and the region-based rendering pipeline is integrated with 3D image filters to provide an image-based mechanism for interactive transfer function design.The system has been recently released as public domain software for CAVE/ImmersaDesk users,and is currently being actively used by various scientific and biomedical visualization projects.     

A Survey of Volumetric Illumination Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering

Interactive volume rendering in its standard formulation has become an increasingly important tool in many application domains. In recent years several advanced volumetric illumination techniques to be used in interactive scenarios have been proposed. These techniques claim to have perceptual benefits as well as being capable of producing more realistic volume rendered images. Naturally, they cover a wide spectrum of illumination effects, including varying shading and scattering effects. In this survey, we review and classify the existing techniques for advanced volumetric illumination. The classification will be conducted based on their technical realization, their performance behaviour as well as their perceptual capabilities. Based on the limitations revealed in this review, we will define future challenges in the area of interactive advanced volumetric illumination.     

基于一种新模型的交互式体绘制算法的研究

交互式体绘制算法基于一个新的可视化模型。目的是研究一种快速预览技术，在可视化内部结构时不需要专门的耗时巨大的转换函数。用两个参数来控制一个非常简单的绘制模型。交互旋转技术不需要任何特殊的硬件支持，所以可以广泛应用在低配置的电脑上。     

Volumetric Billboards

We introduce an image‐based representation, called volumetric billboards, allowing for the real‐time rendering of semi‐transparent and visually complex objects arbitrarily distributed in a 3D scene. Our representation offers full parallax effect from any viewing direction and improved anti‐aliasing of distant objects. It correctly handles transparency between multiple and possibly overlapping objects without requiring any primitive sorting. Furthermore, volumetric billboards can be easily integrated into common rasterization‐based renderers, which allows for their concurrent use with polygonal models and standard rendering techniques such as shadow‐mapping. The representation is based on volumetric images of the objects and on a dedicated real‐time volume rendering algorithm that takes advantage of the GPU geometry shader. Our examples demonstrate the applicability of the method in many cases including levels‐of‐detail representation for multiple intersecting complex objects, volumetric textures, animated objects and construction of high‐resolution objects by assembling instances of low‐resolution volumetric billboards.     

Visualization of Large‐Scale Urban Models through Multi‐Level Relief Impostors

In this paper, we present an efficient approach for the interactive rendering of large‐scale urban models, which can be integrated seamlessly with virtual globe applications. Our scheme fills the gap between standard approaches for distant views of digital terrains and the polygonal models required for close‐up views. Our work is oriented towards city models with real photographic textures of the building facades. At the heart of our approach is a multi‐resolution tree of the scene defining multi‐level relief impostors. Key ingredients of our approach include the pre‐computation of a small set of zenithal and oblique relief maps that capture the geometry and appearance of the buildings inside each node, a rendering algorithm combining relief mapping with projective texture mapping which uses only a small subset of the pre‐computed relief maps, and the use of wavelet compression to simulate two additional levels of the tree. Our scheme runs considerably faster than polygonal‐based approaches while producing images with higher quality than competing relief‐mapping techniques. We show both analytically and empirically that multi‐level relief impostors are suitable for interactive navigation through large urban models.     

Efficient CPU‐based Volume Ray Tracing Techniques

Recent research on high‐performance ray tracing has achieved real‐time performance even for highly complex surface models already on a single PC. In this report, we provide an overview of techniques for extending real‐time ray tracing also to interactive volume rendering. We review fast rendering techniques for different volume representations and rendering modes in a variety of computing environments. The physically‐based rendering approach of ray tracing enables high image quality and allows for easily mixing surface, volume and other primitives in a scene, while fully accounting for all of their optical interactions. We present optimized implementations and discuss the use of upcoming high‐performance processors for volume ray tracing.     

Volumetric texture synthesis for non-photorealistic volume rendering of medical data

This paper presents a novel technique, called volumetric texture synthesis, for non-photorealistic volume rendering. It extends texture synthesis from 2D areas/3D surfaces to volumes. By selecting different texture samples, it allows for a wide variety of stylized rendering for the target volume. As a preprocessing step, volume data analysis is used to identify texture orientations for the volume. This is followed by volumetric texture synthesis, which generates 3D non-photorealistic textures along the identified texture orientations. Finally, standard volume rendering is applied to display the volume data decorated by the texture. Experimental results are provided in the paper.     

MesoGAN: Generative Neural Reflectance Shells

We introduce MesoGAN, a model for generative 3D neural textures. This new graphics primitive represents mesoscale appearance by combining the strengths of generative adversarial networks (StyleGAN) and volumetric neural field rendering. The primitive can be applied to surfaces as a neural reflectance shell; a thin volumetric layer above the surface with appearance parameters defined by a neural network. To construct the neural shell, we first generate a 2D feature texture using StyleGAN with carefully randomized Fourier features to support arbitrarily sized textures without repeating artefacts. We augment the 2D feature texture with a learned height feature, which aids the neural field renderer in producing volumetric parameters from the 2D texture. To facilitate filtering, and to enable end-to-end training within memory constraints of current hardware, we utilize a hierarchical texturing approach and train our model on multi-scale synthetic datasets of 3D mesoscale structures. We propose one possible approach for conditioning MesoGAN on artistic parameters (e.g. fibre length, density of strands, lighting direction) and demonstrate and discuss integration into physically based renderers.     

A Framework for Interactive Hypertexture Modelling

Hypertexturing can be a powerful way of adding rich geometric details to surfaces at low memory cost by using a procedural three‐dimensional (3D) space distortion. However, this special kind of texturing technique still raises a major problem: the efficient control of the visual result. In this paper, we introduce a framework for interactive hypertexture modelling. This framework is based on two contributions. First, we propose a reformulation of the density modulation function. Our density modulation is based on the notion of shape transfer function. This function, which can be easily edited by users, allows us to control in an intuitive way the visual appearance of the geometric details resulting from the space distortion. Second, we propose to use a hybrid surface and volume‐point‐based representation in order to be able to dynamically hypertexture arbitrary objects at interactive frame rates. The rendering consists in a combined splat‐ and raycasting‐based direct volume rendering technique. The splats are used to model the volumetric object while raycasting allows us to add the details. An experimental study on users shows that our approach improves the design of hypertextures and yet preserves their procedural nature.     

Volumetric virtual environments

Driven by fast development of both virtual reality and volume visualization,we discuss some critical techniques towards building a volumetric VR system,specifically the modeling,rendering,and manipulations of a volumetric scene.Techniques such as voxel-based object simplification,accelerated volume rendering,fast stereo volume rendering,and volumetric “collision detection“ are introduced and improved,with the idea of demonstrating the possibilities and potential benefits of incorporating volumetric models into VR systems.     

Incremental Volume Rendering Using Hierarchical Compression

We present a new algorithm here for efficient incremental rendering of volumetric datasets. The primary goal of this algorithm is to give average workstations the ability to efficiently render volume data received over relatively low bandwidth network links in such a way that rapid user feedback is maintained. Common limitations of workstation rendering of volume data include: large memory overheads, the requirement of expensive rendering hardware, and high speed processing ability. The rendering algorithm presented here overcomes these problems by making use of the efficient Shear-Warp Factorisation method which does not require specialised graphics hardware. However the original Shear-Warp algorithm suffers from a high memory overhead and does not provide for incremental rendering which is required should rapid user feedback be maintained. Our algorithm represents the volumetric data using a hierarchical data structure which provides for the incremental classification and rendering of volume data. This exploits the multiscale nature of the octree data structure. The algorithm reduces the memory footprint of the original Shear-Warp Factorisation algorithm by a factor of more than two, while maintaining good rendering performance. These factors make our octree algorithm more suitable for implementation on average desktop workstations for the purposes of interactive exploration of volume models over a network. Results from tests using typical volume datasets will be presented which demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to achieve high rendering rates for both incremental rendering and standard rendering while reducing the runtime memory requirements.     

Interactive volume rendering of large fields

We first present the volume-rendering pipeline and the most typical of the existing methods for each pipeline stage. The complexity of each stage in terms of computing time is analyzed for each method. Then the demands and the scope of interactive volume rendering are briefly summarized. Based on this analysis we examine alternate solutions to optimize each pipeline stage in order to allow interactive visualization while maintaining the image quality. The proposed method maximizes interactive manipulation possibilities and minimizes runtimes by sampling at the Nyquist rate and by flexibly trading off quality for performance at any pipeline level. Our approach is suitable for rendering large, scalar, discrete volume fields such as semitransparent clouds (or X-rays) on the fly.     

虚拟手术中的模型实时绘制

实时的视觉反馈在虚拟手术中可以加强操作者的沉浸感。该文分析了体绘制和面绘制的优缺点,在系统实时性的要求下,实现了基于立体纹理映射的三维体模型的面绘制。算法在容许实时交互的同时,为操作者提供了真实感较强的视觉反馈。由于文中立体纹理生成及纹理坐标计算的特殊性,对虚拟手术中的拉压变形和切割等操作也能很好地处理。     

加速体绘制技术

根据体绘制成像的各个操作环节，对体绘制的加速技术进行了较全面且系统的介绍，包括色彩合成、光线与数据的求交、插值计算、排序及视见变换、对体绘制的基于硬件及系统方面的加速技术（如并行体绘制和漫游体绘制）也进行了一些讨论，在实际应用中，只有将各种加速技术进行有机地结合才能充分发挥体绘制的可视化作用。     

View-dependent textured splatting

We present a novel approach to render low resolution point clouds with multiple high resolution textures – the type of data typical from passive vision systems. The low precision, noisy, and sometimes incomplete nature of such data sets is not suitable for existing point-based rendering techniques that are designed to work with high precision and high density point clouds. Our new algorithm – view-dependent textured splatting (VDTS) – combines traditional splatting with a view-dependent texturing strategy to reduce rendering artifacts caused by imprecision or noise in the input data.VDTS requires no pre-processing of input data, addresses texture aliasing, and most importantly, processes texture visibility on-the-fly. The combination of these characteristics makes VDTS well-suited for interactive rendering of dynamic scenes. Towards this end, we present a real-time view acquisition and rendering system to demonstrate the effectiveness of VDTS. In addition, we show that VDTS can produce high quality rendering when the texture images are augmented with per-pixel depth. In this scenario, VDTS is a reasonable alternative for interactive rendering of large CG models.     

医学体数据三维可视化技术

医学体数据的可视化是科学计算可视化的重要研究领域,其处理过程包括体数据的获取、模型的建立、数据的映射、绘制等操作。论文对医学体数据可视化的相关技术进行了综述,讨论了医学体数据的结构模型和表示方法,全面地分析了医学体数据可视化中各种算法和技术的特点,及相关的加速技术,探讨了目前医学体数据可视化存在的问题及发展趋势。     

Interactive wireless virtual colonoscopy

We present an interactive virtual colon navigation system on a PDA that is a client-server system over a wireless network. For improving the quality of the rendering results on the PDA, the overall rendering speed, and the user interactivity, we propose three novel methods and adapt a GPU-based direct volume rendering technique. Using these proposed methods, our system can support approximately a two times faster navigation speed and 17 percent better PSNR than previous remote visualization methods with a 512×512×361 volumetric colon CT data using a PDA device over 802.11b wireless network.     

Volumetric video compression for interactive playback

We develop a volumetric video system which supports interactive browsing of compressed time-varying volumetric features (significant isosurfaces and interval volumes). Since the size of even one volumetric frame in a time-varying 3D data set is very large, transmission and on-line reconstruction are the main bottlenecks for interactive remote visualization of time-varying volume and surface data. We describe a compression scheme for encoding time-varying volumetric features in a unified way, which allows for on-line reconstruction and rendering. To increase the run-time decompression speed and compression ratio, we decompose the volume into small blocks and encode only the significant blocks that contribute to the isosurfaces and interval volumes. The results show that our compression scheme achieves high compression ratio with fast reconstruction, which is effective for interactive client-side rendering of time-varying volumetric features.     

彩色三维体数据场的直接体绘制方法

提出基于光线投射和三维纹理映射的彩色体数据成像算法，研究如何从每个体素的R，G，B三元组映射成不透明度值，即不透明度转换函数。首先把原始的RGB色彩空间转换成LUV色彩空间；然后以亮度分量的中心差分来近似估计法向量，并应用Phong光照模型进行着色，根据亮度分量及其梯度等信息计算不透明度值；最后合成、累积颜色。对美国数字人男子照相彩色体数据分别采用两种算法进行实验。结果表明：基于光线投射的彩色体数据算法成像质量较高，可以表现体表毛细血管等细微结构，但速度较慢；基于三维纹理映射的彩色体数据成像算法速度较快，但成像质量适中。