Template-based rendering of run-length encoded volumes

Abstract

Template-based volume rendering is an acceleration technique for volume ray casting. It does not trade-off the image quality for the rendering speed. However, it still falls short of interactive manipulation of volume data, mainly due to the ray-by-ray volume access pattern and the long ray path in the transparent regions. In this paper, we present an object-order template-based volume rendering method that uses run-length encoding to enable the skipping of highly transparent regions. We present three algorithms, one for each principal axis direction. By combining the advantages of object-order volume traversal and run-length encoded volumes, the algorithms achieve high-quality rendering in a much shorter time than the original template-based volume rendering.