State of the Art in Volume Rendering

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa

This chapter will give a brief scientific background about volume rendering techniques in general. We start by introducing a common optical model and then discuss several algorithms and optimizations that have been proposed.

Subsections

• Optical Model for Volume Rendering
• Volume Rendering Techniques
  • Image-Order Volume Rendering
    • Image-Space Coherency
    • Object-Space Coherency
    • Inter-Ray Coherency
    • Inter-Frame Coherency
    • Empty Space Skipping
    • Efficient Memory Access
  • Object-Order Volume Rendering
  • Hybrid-Order Volume Rendering
  • Texture Mapping Techniques
  • Special-Purpose Hardware
  
  
• Comparison of Volume Rendering Algorithms