Flat blocking multi-resolution direct volume rendering

Through GPU-based direct volume rendering is the standard volume rendering method, it is hardly for it to render the large-scale volumetric data in real-time. And it is an important issue to utilize multi-resolution idea for improving the efficiency of volume rendering. However, most of them are related to the hierarchical multi-resolution representation, which employ the octree data structure to block the original volume data recursively, and it can not explore the interest region with large variation among the scalar values in such region. This paper proposes a novel method, which uses the flat blocking schema to block the original volume data, after determining the level of detail (LOD) of every block adaptively by the user predefinition, the flat multi-resolution blocking representation is established. When rendering, the re-sampling and ray composition will be operated by applying the corresponding adaptive ray casting algorithm. The experiments implemented on GPU demonstrate that our approach can improve the rendering efficiency with a higher quality image than previous methods. © 2010 Binary Information Press.