Efficient display of background objects for virtual endoscopy using flexible first-hit ray casting

Abstract

Many applications of virtual endoscopy require the display of background objects behind the semi-transparent surface of the investigated organ. This paper deals with pre-processing and visualization of background objects for virtual endoscopy. A new first-hit ray casting technique for efficient perspective iso-surfacing of arbitrarily selected objects of interest is described: Visualization is performed without the use of dedicated hardware or data structures limiting flexibility (e.g., polygonal meshes or distance fields). The speedup is gained by exploiting inter-pixel coherency and by finding a near-optimal compromise between reduction of ray-tracking distances and limitation of the administrational cost associated with this reduction. The algorithm was developed by enhancing the previously published cell-based first-hit ray casting algorithm. This paper describes the original algorithm and explains the extensions needed to achieve interactive rendering of background objects.