APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR REAL-TIME VOLUME VISUALIZATION.

摘要

Real-time processing of voxels and real-time volume visualization of objects and scenes in a highly parallel and pipelined manner including a three-dimensional skewed memory (22), two-dimensional skewed buffers (24), 3-D interpolation and shading of data points, and signal compositing. Implementing ray-casting, a powerful volume rendering technique. Viewing rays are cast from the viewing position into a cubic frame buffer (40) and beams of voxels, which are parallel to the face of the cubic frame buffer (40), are accessed. At evenly spaced sample points along each viewing ray, each sample point is trilinearly interpolated using values of surrounding voxels. Using a gradient and the interpolated sample values, a local shading model (30) is applied and a sample opacity is assigned. Finally, ray samples along the ray are composited into pixel values and provided to a display device (44) to produce an image.