Efficient and Effective Volume Visualization with Enhanced Isosurface Rendering

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced isosurface rendering technique that improves visualization effectiveness by adding color enhancement and explicit scene exploration features, while maintaining high performance.

Contribution

The work develops novel methods for color enhancement and scene exploration in isosurface rendering, enabling better internal structure visualization and material property depiction.

Findings

Color enhancement improves internal structure visibility.

Explicit scene exploration aids in complex structure analysis.

Performance remains efficient despite added visualization features.

Abstract

Compared with full volume rendering, isosurface rendering has several well recognized advantages in efficiency and accuracy. However, standard isosurface rendering has some limitations in effectiveness. First, it uses a monotone colored approach and can only visualize the geometry features of an isosurface. The lack of the capability to illustrate the material property and the internal structures behind an isosurface has been a big limitation of this method in applications. Another limitation of isosurface rendering is the difficulty to reveal physically meaningful structures, which are hidden in one or multiple isosurfaces. As such, the application requirements of extract and recombine structures of interest can not be implemented effectively with isosurface rendering. In this work, we develop an enhanced isosurface rendering technique to improve the effectiveness while maintaining the performance efficiency of the standard isosurface rendering. First, an isosurface color enhancement method is proposed to illustrate the neighborhood density and to reveal some of the internal structures. Second, we extend the structure extraction capability of isosurface rendering by enabling explicit scene exploration within a 3D-view, using surface peeling, voxel-selecting, isosurface segmentation, and multi-surface-structure visualization. Our experiments show that the color enhancement not only improves the visual fidelity of the rendering, but also reveals the internal structures without significant increase of the computational cost. Explicit scene exploration is also demonstrated as a powerful tool in some application scenarios, such as displaying multiple abdominal organs.