A hardware architecture for video rate smooth shading of Volume data

Abstract

This paper describes a new architecture for generat ing smoothly shaded two dimensional images of volume data. This architecture fits into an image synthesis pipeline and uses only simple arithmetic operations and a look-up table to generate two dimensional images in real time. The shading algorithm is an extensioll of the grey-level gradient algorithm for shading volume data. The shading technique produces smooth images for vox elized geometrical data and sampled volume data. Im age synthesis from volume data in real time is an impor tant technique in visualization and graphics systems.