Multiresolution maximum intensity volume rendering by morphological pyramids

We propose a multiresolution representation for maximum intensity projection (MIP) volume rendering, based on morphological pyramids which allow progressive refinement and have the property of perfect reconstruction. The pyramidal analysis and synthesis operators are composed of morphological erosion and dilation, combined with dyadic downsampling for analysis and dyadic upsampling for synthesis. The structure of the multiresolution MIP representation is very similar to wavelet splatting, the main differences being that (i) linear summation of voxel values is replaced by maximum computation, and (ii) linear wavelet filters are replaced by (nonlinear) morphological filters.