Spectral volume rendering using GPU-based raycasting

Magnus Strengert, Thomas Klein, Ralf Botchen, Simon Stegmaier, Min Chen, Thomas Ertl
2006 The Visual Computer  
Traditional volume rendering does not incorporate a number of optical properties that are typically observed for semi-transparent materials, such as glass or water, in the real world. Therefore, we have extended GPUbased raycasting to spectral volume rendering based on the Kubelka-Munk theory for light propagation in parallel colorant layers of a turbid medium. This allows us to demonstrate the effects of selective absorption and dispersion in refractive materials, by generating volume
more » ... s using real physical optical properties. We show that this extended volume rendering technique can be easily incorporated into a flexible framework for GPU-based volume raycasting. Our implementation shows a promising performance for a number of real data sets. Particularly, we obtain up to 100 times the performance of a comparable CPU implementation.
doi:10.1007/s00371-006-0028-0 fatcat:muuqmlgd65deflnt65ja25pbne