Raycasting of light field galleries from volumetric data

Abstract

The paper describes a technique to generate high-quality light field representations from volumetric data. We show how light field galleries can be created to give unexperienced audiences access to interactive high-quality volume renditions. The proposed light field representation is lightweight with respect to storage and bandwidth capacity and is thus ideal as exchange format for visualization results, especially for web galleries. The approach expands an existing sphere-hemisphere parameterization for the light field with per-pixel depth. High-quality paraboloid maps from volumetric data are generated using GPU-based ray-casting or slicing approaches. Different layers, such as isosurfaces, but not restricted to, can be generated independently and composited in real time. This allows the user to interactively explore the model and to change visibility parameters at run-time. © 2008 The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.