Two-phase perspective ray casting for interactive volume navigation

Volume navigation is the interactive exploration of volume data sets by "flying" the view point through the data, producing a volume rendered view at each frame. The authors present an inexpensive perspective volume navigation method designed to run on a PC platform with accelerated 3D graphics hardware. They compute perspective projections at each frame, allow trilinear interpolation of sample points, and render both gray scale and RGB volumes by volumetric compositing. The implementation handles arbitrarily large volumes, by dynamically swapping data within the local depth-limited frustum into main memory as the viewpoint moves through the volume. They describe a new ray casting algorithm that takes advantage of the coherence inherent in adjacent frames to generate a sequence of approximate animated frames much faster than they could be computed individually. They also take advantage of the 3D graphics acceleration hardware to offload much of the alpha blending and resampling from the CPU.