An anti-aliasing technique for splatting

Splatting is a popular direct volume rendering algorithm. However, the algorithm does not correctly render cases where the volume sampling rate is higher than the image sampling rate (e.g. more than one voxel maps into a pixel). This situation arises with orthographic projections of high-resolution volumes, as well as with perspective projections of volumes of any resolution. The result is potentially severe spatial and temporal aliasing artifacts. Some volume ray-casting algorithms avoid these artifacts by employing reconstruction kernels which vary in width as the rays diverge. Unlike ray-casting algorithms, existing splatting algorithms do not have an equivalent mechanism for avoiding these artifacts. The authors propose such a mechanism, which delivers high-quality splatted images and has the potential for a very efficient hardware implementation.