Memory and processing architecture for 3D voxel-based imagery |
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Authors: | Kaufman A. Bakalash R. |
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Affiliation: | State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook, NY; |
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Abstract: | A versatile voxel-based architecture for 3-D volume visualization, called the Cube architecture, is introduced. A small-scale prototype of the architecture has been realized in hardware and has been operating in true real-time, faster than the alternative voxel systems. The Cube architecture is centered around a 3-D cubic frame buffer, of voxels, and it entertains three processors that access the frame buffer to input sampled and synthetic data, to manipulate the 3-D images, and to project and render them. To cope with the huge quantity of voxels and still perform in real-time, two special features were incorporated within the architecture: a unique skewed memory organization, which permits the retrieval and storage of voxels in parallel, and a multiple-write bus, which speeds up the viewing process. These features allow Cube, for example, to project an image of n3 voxels in O(n 2 log n) time rather than the conventional O( n3) time |
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