On enhancing the speed of splatting with indexing

Abstract

Splatting is an object-space direct volume rendering algorithm that produces images of high quality, but is computationally expensive like many other volume rendering algorithms. This paper presents a new technique that enhances the speed of splatting without trading off image quality. This new method reduces rendering time by employing a simple indexing mechanism which allows to visit and splat only the voxels of interest. It is shown that this algorithm is suitable for the dynamic situation in which viewing parameters and opacity transfer functions change interactively. We report experimental results on several test data sets of useful size and complexity, and discuss the cost/benefit trade-off of our method.