Progressive CPU Volume Rendering with Sample Accumulation

Journal Article · Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2017 · Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2312/pgv.20171090· OSTI ID:1756054

Usher, Will ^[1]; Amstutz, Jefferson ^[2]; Brownlee, Carson ^[2]; Knoll, Aaron ^[3]; Wald, I. ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States); Intel Corp., Mountain View, CA (United States); University of Utah
2. Intel Corp., Mountain View, CA (United States)
3. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)

Here, we present a new method for progressive volume rendering by accumulating object-space samples over successively rendered frames. Existing methods for progressive refinement either use image space methods or average pixels over frames, which can blur features or integrate incorrectly with respect to depth. Our approach stores samples along each ray, accumulates new samples each frame into a buffer, and progressively interleaves and integrates these samples. Though this process requires additional memory, it ensures interactivity and is well suited for CPU architectures with large memory and cache. This approach also extends well to distributed rendering in cluster environments. We implement this technique in Intel’s open source OSPRay CPU ray tracing framework and demonstrate that it is particularly useful for rendering volumetric data with costly sampling functions.

• Research Organization: Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: Intel Parallel Computing Centers; National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC)
• Grant/Contract Number: NA0002375; SC0007446; SC0010498
• OSTI ID: 1756054
• Journal Information: Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization, Journal Name: Eurographics Symposium on Parallel Graphics and Visualization Vol. 2017; ISSN 1727-348X
• Publisher: The Eurographics Association
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
Computer Graphics
Picture/Image Generation—Display Algorithms
Ray Tracing
OSPRay CPU
Rendering Volumetric Data