KVS: A simple and effective framework for scientific visualization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a visualization development framework that is a C++ class library for easily and efficiently rendering three-dimensional datasets, such as numerical simulation results, medical image datasets, and measurement datasets. Our framework pro-vides a modular programming environment that supports the construction and execution of a visualization pipeline and allows the user to readily implement custom visualization algo-rithms using our simple module-based execution model. In addition, we also provide a simple implementation of a visualization environment that can handle multiple volumes and semi-transparent polygons in a single scene, which we call a fused visualization environment. Although many visualization software packages have been proposed thus far, such an envi-ronment has not previously been supported because of the visibility ordering problem. To confirm the effectiveness of our proposed visualization framework, we demonstrate several visualization applications implemented using this framework.