Overlapped Tiling for Fast Random Oblique Plane Access of 3D Object Datasets

Abstract

Volume visualization with random data access poses significant challenges. While tiling techniques lead to simple implementations, they are not well suited for cases where the goal is to access arbitrarily located subdimensional datasets (e.g., being able to display an arbitrary 2D planar “cut” from a 3D volume). Significant effort has been devoted to volumetric data compression, with most techniques proposing to tile volumes into cuboid subvolumes to enable random access. In this paper we show that, in cases where subdimensional datasets are accessed, this leads to significant transmission inefficiency. As an alternative, we propose novel serverclient based data representation and retrieval methods which can be used for fast random access of oblique plane from 3D volume datasets. In this paper, 3D experiments are shown but the approach may be extended to higher dimensional datasets. We use multiple redundant tilings of the 3D object, where each tiling has a different orientation.We discuss the 3D rectangular tiling scheme and two main algorithm components of such 3D system, namely, (i) a search algorithm to determine which tiles should be retrieved for a given query and (ii) a mapping algorithm to enable efficient encoding without interpolation of rotated tiles. In exchange for increased server storage, we demonstrate that significant reductions in average transmission rate can be achieved relative to conventional cubic tiling techniques, e.g., nearly 40% reduction in average transmission rate for less than a factor of twenty overhead in storage before compression. Note that, as shown in our earlier work on the 2D case, the storage overhead will be lower after compression (e.g., in 2D the relative increase in storage in the compressed domain was at least a factor of two lower than in the uncompressed domain.)