A Hardware Architecture for Multi-Resolution Volume Rendering

Abstract

In this paper we propose a hardware accelerated ray-casting architecture for multi-resolution volumetric datasets. The architecture is targeted at rendering very large datasets with limited voxel memory resources for both cases where the working set of a frame does or does not fit into the voxel memory. We describe the multi-resolution model used to organize the volume data, especially the wavelet based compression scheme. An efficient hardware implementation of the wavelet decompression is presented and the considerations for volume memory management are discussed. By incorporating the wavelet decompression in hardware a multiple of the decompression bandwidth compared to a PC can be achieved. We also show that the impact of our multi-resolution scheme on the actual ray-casting pipeline is minimal.