A New Sampling Scheme for Slice Based Volume Rendering

Abstract

In this paper we present a novel approach to generate proxy geometry for slice based volume rendering. The basic idea is derived from the behavior of a ray-caster and is a simple extension of the well known 2D object-aligned texture stack based technique. From this our novel scheme inherits the advantage that it enables hardware-based volume rendering for devices that do not support 3D textures. On these devices previous object-aligned 2D texture based approaches suffered from disturbing view angle dependent stack-switching artifacts which are avoided by our novel method. Our approach also shows benefits compared to the widely used view aligned slicing algorithm as it avoids jagged boundary artifacts and increases performance.