Fast cube cutting for interactive volume visualization

Abstract

Visualizing 3D volume datasets has received a great deal of attention in many areas: medical imaging, geoscience, and astrophysics are a few such areas. With improvements of commodity graphics cards, texture-based visualization methods have become popular. Within these methods, intersecting a series of planes with a cube is a common problem. While there are standard methods for approaching this problem, visualizing large data sets in real-time require faster approaches. We present a sweeping algorithm that determines the sequence of topology changes (STC) of the intersection of a cube with a plane as it moves through the cube. We use this algorithm to construct a table of these topological changes that maps view vectors to an STC. With this sequence of topology changes, we generate the polygonal intersections via vector addition. Finally, we use our approach in an octree-based, empty-space culling framework to further reduce the rendering time for large volumes. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.