Interactive volume illumination of slice-based ray casting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel slice-based ray casting method for volume rendering that enhances global illumination effects like shadows and scattering, offering improved visual quality and scalability.

Contribution

It presents a flexible, high-performance approach to implement realistic volume illumination effects in slice-based ray casting, surpassing existing local illumination techniques.

Findings

Enhanced volume illumination effects achieved

Better scalability compared to local illumination methods

Improved perception of shape and depth in volumetric datasets

Abstract

Volume rendering always plays an important role in the field of medical imaging and industrial design. In recent years, the realistic and interactive volume rendering of the global illumination can improve the perception of shape and depth of volumetric datasets. In this paper, a novel and flexible performance method of slice-based ray casting is proposed to implement the volume illumination effects, such as volume shadow and other scattering effects. This benefits from the slice-based illumination attenuation buffers of the whole geometry slices at the viewpoint of the light source and the high-efficiency shadow or scattering coefficient calculation per sample in ray casting. These tests show the method can obtain much better volume illumination effects and more scalable performance in contrast to the local volume illumination in ray casting volume rendering or other similar slice-based global volume illumination.