Spectral volume rendering using GPU-based raycasting

Traditional volume rendering does not incorporate a number of optical properties that are typically observed for semi-transparent materials, such as glass or water, in the real world. Therefore, we have extended GPU-based raycasting to spectral volume rendering based on the Kubelka–Munk theory for light propagation in parallel colorant layers of a turbid medium. This allows us to demonstrate the effects of selective absorption and dispersion in refractive materials, by generating volume renderings using real physical optical properties. We show that this extended volume rendering technique can be easily incorporated into a flexible framework for GPU-based volume raycasting. Our implementation shows a promising performance for a number of real data sets. In particular, we obtain up to 100 times the performance of a comparable CPU implementation.