Abstract: Volume rendering plays a significant role in medical imaging and engineering applications. To obtain an improved three-dimensional shape perception of volumetric datasets, realistic volume illumination has been considerably studied in recent years. However, the calculation overhead associated with interactive volume rendering is unusually high, and the solvability of the problem is adversely affected when the data size and algorithm complexity are increased. In this study, a scalable and GPU-based multi-slice per pass (MSPP) volume rendering algorithm is proposed which can quickly generate global volume shadow and achieve a translucent effect based on the transfer function, so as to improve perception of the shape and depth of volumetric datasets. In our real-world data tests, MSPP significantly outperforms some complex volume shadow algorithms without losing the illumination effects, for example, half-angle slicing. Furthermore, the MSPP can be easily integrated into the parallel rendering frameworks based on sort-first or sort-last algorithms to accelerate volume rendering. In addition, its scalable slice-based volume rendering framework can be combined with several traditional volume rendering frameworks.

Key words: Volume rendering, Volume illumination, Volumetric datasets, Multi-slice per pass

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