3D fused visualization based on particles-based rendering with opacity using volume texture

Abstract

In medical, scientific and other fields, transparent surface visualization is useful to investigate inner 3D structures. Such visualization usually uses the polygon graphics, where the polygons must be sorted along the line of sight. The sorting, however, requires long computation time for largescale data. Besides order of polygons in the sorting often becomes indefinite especially for intersecting surfaces. On the other hand, the particle-based volume rendering was proposed as a transparent-rendering method which does not require sorting. In addition, the important feature of this method is to generate the particles first only once. The purpose of this paper is to execute the surface rendering with the opacity by using the volume texture. Furthermore, we show the 3D fused image, such as volume-surface. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.