Adaptive Sampling for GPU-based 3-D Volume Rendering

Abstract

3-D interactive volume rendering can be rather complicated through conventional ray casting with simple sampling and texture mapping. Owing to the limitation of hardware resources, volume rendering algorithms are considerably time-consuming. Therefore, adaptive sampling technique is proposed to tackle the problem of excessive computational cost. In this paper, considering an optimization in parallelized ray-casting algorithms of volume rendering, we propose an adaptive sampling method, which mainly reduces the number of sampling points through non-linear sampling function. This new method can be rather effective while making a trade-off between performance and rendering quality. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive sampling method can result in high efficiency in computation, and produce high-quality image based on the MSE and SSIM metrics.