Real-time Deblocked GPU Rendering of Compressed Volumes

Abstract

The wide majority of current state-of-the-art compressed GPU volume renderers are based on block-transform coding, which is susceptible to blocking artifacts, particularly at low bit-rates. In this paper we address the problem for the first time, by introducing a specialized deferred filtering architecture working on block-compressed data and including a novel deblocking algorithm. The architecture efficiently performs high quality shading of massive datasets by closely coordinating visibility- and resolution-aware adaptive data loading with GPU-accelerated per-frame data decompression, deblocking, and rendering. A thorough evaluation including quantitative and qualitative measures demonstrates the performance of our approach on large static and dynamic datasets including a massive 5124 turbulence simulation (256GB), which is aggressively compressed to less than 2 GB, so as to fully upload it on graphics board and to explore it in real-time during animation.