Accelerating Volume Reconstruction With 3D Texture Hardware

Abstract

This paper describes a new method of rendering volumes that leverages the 3D texturing hardware in Silicon Graphics RealityEngine ™ workstations. The method defines the volume data as a 3D texture and utilizes the parallel texturing hardware to perform reconstruction and resampling on polygons embedded in the texture. The resampled data on each polygon is transformed into color and opacity values and composited into the frame buffer. A 128×128×64 volume is rendered into a 512 2 window at over 10 frames per-second. Two alternative strategies for embedding the resampling polygons are described and their trade-offs are discussed. This method is easy to implement and we apply it to the production of digitally reconstructed radiographs as well as opacity-based volume rendered images. The generality of this approach is demonstrated by describing its application to the proposed PixelFlow graphics system. PixelFlow overcomes the lighting and volume size limitations imposed by the RealityEngine. It is expected to render 256 3 data sets on a 640×512 screen at over 10 frames per second 1.