A Survey of Transfer Functions Suitable for Volume Rendering

Abstract

There are many transfer functions (TF) that emphasize or hide special features of volume data. Their potential to cleverly generate a color and opacity value for direct volume rendering is primarily determined by the used metrics besides the input data value. Despite this variety of TFs, for the most part simple one dimensional data value only based TFs are used in practice. This survey will therefore examine the differences in representative TF types (defined by their used metrics) to provide a basis for selecting the right TF type for the boundary conditions that describe an individual field of application and task. Besides fundamental properties like metrics or memory consumption, we will also give an assessment about user interaction and quality of feature emphasis.