Stereo Pseudo 3D Rendering for Web-based Display of Scientific Volumetric Data

Abstract

Advancement in high-throughput microscopy technology such as the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscopy (KESM) is enabling the production of massive amounts of high-resolution volumetric data of biological microstructures. To fully utilize these data, they should be efficiently distributed to the scientific research community (e.g., through the Internet) and should be easily annotated and analyzed. Given the volumetric nature of the data, visualizing them in 3D is important. Since we cannot assume that every end user has high-end hardware, an approach that has minimal hardware requirement will be necessary. There are several prominent applications that facilitate the viewing of large collections of images over the web. Google Maps and Google Maps-like interfaces such as Brainmaps.org allow users to pan and zoom 2D images efficiently. However, they do not yet support the rendering of volumetric data in their standard web interface. Thus, we propose a new method of rendering volumetric data over the web that directly uses the raw image stack, without any computation on the data at all. The human visual system has the capability of viewing stereo images in 2D and turn that into a 3D perception. To generate stereo images, we will need to create the effects of depth and binocular disparity using 2D images. By using simple HTML and JavaScript that are computationally cheap, we can accomplish both tasks dynamically in a standard web browser, by overlaying the images with intervening semi-opaque layers. We expect the approach presented in this paper to be applicable to a broader domain, including geology and meteorology.