Accelerated Volume Rendering with Chebyshev Distance Maps

Abstract

Volume rendering has useful applications with emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality. The high frame rate targets of these technologies poses a problem for volume rendering because of its very high computational complexity compared with conventional surface rendering. We developed an efficient empty space skipping algorithm for accelerating volume rendering. A distance map is generated which indicates the Chebyshev distance to the nearest occupied region (with non-transparent voxels) within a volume. The distance map is used to efficiently skip empty regions while volume ray casting. We show improved performance over state-of-the-art empty space skipping techniques.