Accelerate Volume Splatting by Using Run Length Encoding

摘要

Methods such as splat hierarchies, indexing and lists have been presented by the research society in recently years, to accelerate the splatting, a popular volume rendering algorithm. In this paper, a run length encoding (RLE) accelerated, pre-classification and pre-shade sheet buffer volume splatting algorithm is presented, which can enhance the speed of splatting without trading off image quality. This new technique saves rendering time by employing RLE mechanism so that only voxels of interest are processed in splatting. RLE based data structures are defined to exploit spatial coherence of volume and intermediate rendering images. A fast and accurate sheet buffer splatting method is used in the rendering process, which accelerates the splatting by traversing both the voxel scanline and the image scanline in sheet buffer simultaneously. Experiments practice proves that RLE can efficiently skip over transparent voxels in splatting and high speedup can be obtained by using the proposed algorithm.