Adaptive Sampling in Single Pass, GPU-based Raycasting of Multiresolution Volumes

Abstract

This paper presents a novel direct volume rendering technique for adaptive object- and image-space sampling density of multiresolution volumes. The raycasting is implemented entirely on the GPU in a single pass fragment program which adapts the sampling density along rays, guided by block resolutions. The multiresolution volumes are provided by a transfer function based level-of-detail scheme adaptively loading large out-of-core volumes. Adaptive image-space sampling is achieved by gathering projected basic volume block statistics for screen tiles and then allocating a level-of-detail for each tile. This combination of techniques provides a significant reduction of processing requirements while maintaining high quality rendering.