Advanced techniques for high-quality multi-resolution volume rendering

We present several improvements for compression-based multi-resolution rendering of very large volume data sets at interactive to real-time frame rates on standard PC hardware. The algorithm accepts scalar or multi-variant data sampled on a regular grid as input. The input data are converted into a compressed hierarchical wavelet representation in a pre-processing step. During rendering, the wavelet representation is decompressed on-the-fly and rendered using hardware texture mapping. The level-of-detail used for rendering is adapted to the estimated screen-space error. To.-increase the rendering performance additional visibility tests, such as empty space skipping and occlusion culling, are applied. Furthermore, we discuss how to render the remaining multi-resolution blocks efficiently using modern graphics hardware. Using a prototype implementation of this algorithm we are able to perform a high-quality interactive rendering of large data sets on a single off-the-shelf PC. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.