A Comparative Analysis of Shell Rendering and Shear-Warp Rendering

摘要

In Medical Imaging, shell rendering and shear-warp rendering are two of the most efficient and effective voxel-based techniques for volume visualization. This work presents a comparative analysis of shell rendering and shear-warp rendering in terms of storage, speed, and image quality. We have chosen 10 different objects of various sizes, shapes and topologies and one 1GHz Pentium-Ⅲ PC with 512MB RAM for our experiments. Hard and fuzzy boundaries of up to 2,833K voxels in size have been created to test both methods in surface and volume rendering, respectively. Hard surface shell rendering and surface shear-warp rendering required less than 0.5 second. In the worst case, volume shell rendering required 1.45 second, while volume shear-warp rendering spent 0.65 second for the same task. Shear-warp rendering uses on average from 3 to 6 times more memory space than shell rendering, but it can be up to 2.79 times faster than shell rendering. On average, shear-warp rendering is as fast as shell rendering for hard boundaries and 1.7 times faster than shell rendering for fuzzy boundaries. We have also observed that both can produce similar high-quality images.