Opacity volume based halo generation and depth-dependent halos

Yubo Tao, Chao Wang, Hai Lin, Feng Dong, Gordon Clapworthy
2012 The Visual Computer  
Halos are generally used to enhance depth perception and display spatial relationships in illustrative visualization. In this paper, we present a simple and effective method to create volumetric halo illustration. At the preprocessing stage, we generate, on graphics hardware, a viewindependent halo intensity volume, which contains all of the potential halos around the boundaries of features, based on the opacity volume. During halo rendering, the halo intensity volume is used to extract halos
more » ... ly around the contours of structures for the current viewpoint. The performance of our approach is significantly faster than previous halo illustration methods, which perform both halo generation and rendering during direct volume rendering. We further propose depth-dependent halo effects, including depth color fading and depth width fading. These halo effects adaptively modulate the visual properties of halos to provide more perceptual cues for depth interpretation. Experimental results Y. Tao ( ) · H. Lin demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach and the effectiveness of depth-dependent halos.
doi:10.1007/s00371-012-0764-2 fatcat:cirmpmvt3ffvpbzeja6cj76doy