Hyun Woo Park, Doo Won Paik, Moon Ryul Jung

The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society (1994 ~ 2000), Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 477-487, Feb. 2000
10.3745/KIPSTE.2000.7.2.477,   PDF Download:

Abstract

When volume data is visualized by the ray casting method, the color value of each pixel in the image is obtained by composing the color contributions of the sample points that lie on the ray cast from the pixel point. In most ray tracing methods including Levoy's classical method, the color composition is formulated as a summation of the color contributions of the discrete sample points. However, the more precise color composition is formulated as differential equations over the color contributions of the continuous sample points. The discrete formulation is used, because analytical solutions to the continuous formulations are hard to find. In this paper, however, we have discovered a semi-analytical solution to the continuous formulation of a typical ray tracing of volume data. We have applied both Levoy's method and ours to the same set of data, and compared the visual quality of both results. The comparison shows that our method produces a more fine-grained visualization of volume data.

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