Authors:
Felix Manke
and
Burkhard Wünsche
Affiliation:
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Keyword(s):
Direct volume rendering, visualization tools, vector field visualization, tensor field visualization.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Rendering
;
Systems and Software Architectures for Rendering
;
Volume Rendering
Abstract:
Direct Volume Rendering is a popular method for displaying volumetric data sets without generating intermediate representations. The technique is most frequently applied to scalar data and few specialized techniques exist for visualizing higher-order data, such as tensor fields, directly. This is a serious limitation because progress in medical imaging, satellite technology and numerical simulations has made higher-order and multifield data sets a common entity in medicine, science and engineering. In this paper we present a framework for the interactive exploration of complex data sets using direct volume rendering. This is achieved by applying sophisticated Software Engineering (SE) to modularize the direct volume rendering pipeline and by exploiting the latest advances in graphics hardware and shading languages to modify rendering effects and to compute derived data sets at runtime. We discuss how the framework can be used to mimic the latest specialized direct volume rendering al
gorithms and to interactively explore and gain new insight into high-order and multifield data sets. The capabilities of the framework are demonstrated by three case studies and the efficiency and effectiveness of the framework is evaluated.
(More)