Interactive volume isosurface rendering using BT volumes

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a volume representation format called BT Volumes, along with a technique to interactively render them and two methods to create useful data in BT Volume format, including high quality reconstruction filtering. Medical applications rely heavily on isosurface data to visualize anatomy, but current real-time iso-surface rendering techniques such as Marching Cubes are limited in flexibility and provide only low-order linear reconstruction filtering. As an alternative to creating triangular geometry to represent the surface, we ray trace an exact isosurface directly inside a pixel shader. We construct a set of Bézier Tetrahedra to approximate any reconstruction filter with arbitrary footprint. We then precompute the volume convolved with this filter as a tetrahedral grid with Bézier weights that can be ray traced in graphics hardware. Our technique is fast, renders any isosurface level without additional work, and performs high quality reconstruction filtering with arbitrary footprints and reconstruction kernels.

References

1. Anderson, J. C., Bennett, J., and Joy, K. I. 2005. Marching diamonds for unstructured meshes. In IEEE Visualization 2005, 423--429.
2. Bajaj, C. L., Chen, J., and Xu, G. 1995. Modeling with cubic a-patches. ACM Trans. Graph. 14, 2, 103--133.
3. Carr, H., Moller, T., and Snoeyink, J. 2006. Artifacts caused by simplicial subdivision. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 12, 2, 231--242.
4. Johansson, G., and Carr, H. 2006. Accelerating marching cubes with graphics hardware. In CASCON '06: Proceedings of the 2006 conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 378.
5. Levoy, M. 1990. Efficient ray tracing of volume data. ACM Trans. Graph. 9, 3, 245--261.
6. Loop, C., and Blinn, J. 2005. Resolution independent curve rendering using programmable graphics hardware. In SIGGRAPH '05: ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Papers, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 1000--1009.
7. Loop, C., and Blinn, J. 2006. Real-time gpu rendering of piece-wise algebraic surfaces. In SIGGRAPH '06: ACM SIGGRAPH 2006 Papers, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 664--670.
8. Lorensen, W. E., and Cline, H. E. 1987. Marching cubes: A high resolution 3d surface construction algorithm. In SIGGRAPH '87: Proceedings of the 14th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 163--169.
9. Marschner, S. R., and Lobb, R. J. 1994. An evaluation of reconstruction filters for volume rendering. In VIS '94: Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '94, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 100--107.
10. Mitchell, D. P., and Netravali, A. N. 1988. Reconstruction filters in computer-graphics. In SIGGRAPH '88: Proceedings of the 15th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 221--228.
11. Parker, S., Parker, M., Livnat, Y., Sloan, P.-P., Hansen, C., and Shirley, P. 1999. Interactive ray tracing for volume visualization. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 5, 3 (/), 238--250.
12. Policarpo, F., Oliveira, M. M., and Jo A. L. D. C. 2005. Real-time relief mapping on arbitrary polygonal surfaces. In I3D '05: Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 155--162.
13. Ritsche, N. 2006. Real-time shell space rendering of volumetric geometry. In GRAPHITE '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and Southeast Asia, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 265--274.
14. Rossl, C., Zeilfelder, F., Nurnberger, G., and Seidel, H.-P. 2003. Visualization of volume data with quadratic super splines. In VIS '03: Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Visualization 2003 (VIS'03), IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 52--60.
15. Tatarchuk, N. 2006. Dynamic parallax occlusion mapping with approximate soft shadows. In I3D '06: Proceedings of the 2006 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, 63--69.
16. Theisel, H. 2002. Exact isosurfaces for marching cubes. In Computer Graphics Forum, Blackwell Publishers for Eurographics Association, 19--31.
17. Treece, G. M., Prager, R. W., and Gee, A. H. 1999. Regularised marching tetrahedra: improved iso-surface extraction. Computers and Graphics 23, 4, 583--598.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision problems

        • Reconstruction

  • Computer graphics

    • Shape modeling

      • Parametric curve and surface models

      • Volumetric models