Interactive Exploration of Remote Isosurfaces with Point-Based Non-Photorealistic Rendering

Abstract

We present a non-photo realistic rendering technique for interactive exploration of isosurfaces generated from remote volumetric data. Instead of relying on the conventional smooth shading technique to render the isosurfaces, a point-based technique is used to represent and render the isosurfaces in a remote client-server environment. The non-photo realistic nature of the proposed rendering method enables the server to transmit only the essential surface features, which substantially reduces the network traffic. The algorithm also utilizes frame coherence and efficiently encodes the isosurface configuration inside each voxel cell to further minimize the network overhead. Finally, our algorithm can adjust the point distributions using different illumination settings to adapt to different network speeds.