Cylindrical acceleration structures for large hexahedral volume visualization

Scientific simulations generate large irregular volumes with complex geometry. In volume rendering, the efficiency of the ray casting algorithms relies heavily on acceleration data structures to achieve accurate visual representations at interactive rates. In this paper, two acceleration structures are introduced to visualize a large irregular volume on the GPU: (i) two-level cylindrical grid, and (ii) cylindrical bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). With thorough analysis and detailed experimental results, we demonstrate that the cylindrical data structures can effectively store the hexahedral volumes, reduce duplications, and increase ray casting performance.