Footprint evaluation for volume rendering

Abstract

This paper presents a forward mapping rendering algorithm to display regular volumetric grids that may not have the same spacings in the three grid directions. It takes advantage of the fact that convolution can be thought of as distributing energy from input samples into space. The renderer calculates an image plane footprint for each data sample and uses the footprint to spread the sample's energy onto the image plane. A result of the technique is that the forward mapping algorithm can support perspective without excessive cost, and support adaptive resampling of the three-dimensional data set during image generation.