Complexity Evaluation of CT-Images for GPU-Based Volume Rendering

It is important to evaluate the complexity of images generated from computed tomography (CT) to be processed for GPU-based volume rendering. The complexity evaluation is crucial because it is closely related to the speedup issues of volume rendering in GPU platforms. To evaluate the complexity of volume images, we developed a new algorithm, called EVIC, that first sets the intensity threshold that is the average of the entire image intensity evaluated during ray casting and finally calculates the number of intensity changes each of which is larger than the evaluated threshold for each pair of samples. This algorithm is significant, because it does not take too much additional time to the original ray casting algorithm.