Media.Player

Real-time Volume Rendering Technology on Standard PC

Summary

A computer-based method and system for interactive volume rendering of a large volume data on a conventional personal computer using hardware-accelerated block filtration optimizing uses 3D-textured axis-aligned slices and block filtration. Fragment processing in a rendering pipeline is lessened by passing fragments to various processors selectively in blocks of voxels based on a filtering process operative on slices. The process involves generating a corresponding image texture and performing two-pass rendering, namely a virtual rendering pass and a main rendering pass. Block filtration is divided into static block filtration and dynamic block filtration. The static block filtration locates any view-independent unused signal being passed to a rasterization pipeline. The dynamic block filtration determines any view-dependent unused block generated due to occlusion. Block filtration processes utilize the vertex shader and pixel shader of a GPU in conventional personal computer graphics hardware. The method is for multi-thread, multi-GPU operation. Key Features of the technology: The subject technology can be applied in a wide area of volume rendering applications. At this time, application to computer-aided medicine and medical education has been demonstrated. Interactive volume rendering is extremely tedious, time-consuming, and data-intensive. Fragment processing is made much easier by the technology by a filtering process that involves passing fragments of data through various processors selectively in blocks of volume picture elements (“voxels”). In addition, it is found that the technology:  is faster than existing technologies in the market;  can accommodate a large dataset volume;  is suitable for an ordinary PC;  provides for a real-time, interactive system and method for visualizing images in three dimensions. The approach is a two-pass rendering process making use of the graphics processor unit (GPU) in the graphics hardware of a conventional personal computer.

Industry

Electronics

Sub Category

Display

Application No.

03/ENG/160

Others

Inventor(s): Professor Pheng Ann HENG, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Patent Status:  US Patent no. 7,154,500  Chinese Patent Pending  US CIP Patent no. 7,184,041  Hong Kong Patent Pending  PCT Application Filed

Country/Region

Hong Kong