Level-of-Detail Volume Rendering via 3D Textures

In this paper we present an adaptive approach to volume rendering via 3D textures at arbitrary levels of detail. The algorithm has been designed to enable interactive exploration of large-scale data sets while providing user-adjustable resolution levels. A texture map hierarchy is constructed in a way that minimizes the amount of texture memory with respect to the power-of-two restriction imposed by OpenGL implementations. In addition, our hierarchical level-of-detail representation guarantees consistent interpolation between different resolution levels. Special attention has been paid to the fixing of rendering artifacts that are introduced by non-corrected opacities at level transitions. By adapting the sample slice distance with regard to the desired level-of-detail, the number of texture lookups is reduced significantly.