An Evaluation of Prefiltered Reconstruction Schemes for Volume Rendering

In this paper, prefiltered reconstruction techniques are evaluated for volume-rendering applications. All the analyzed methods perform a discrete prefiltering as a preprocessing of the input samples in order to improve the quality of the continuous reconstruction afterward. Various prefiltering schemes have been proposed to fulfill either the spatial-domain or the frequency-domain criteria. According to our best knowledge, however, their thorough comparative study has not been published yet. Therefore, we derive the frequency responses of the different prefiltered reconstruction techniques to analyze their global behavior such as aliasing or smoothing. Furthermore, we introduce a novel mathematical basis to also compare their spatial-domain behavior in terms of the asymptotic local error effect. For the sake of fair comparison, we use the same linear and cubic B-splines as basis functions, but combined with different discrete prefilters. Our goal with this analysis is to help the potential users to select the optimal prefiltering scheme for their specific applications.