Iso-Contour Volume Rendering

by James Arvo and Kevin Novins In 1994 Symposium on Volume Visualization , pages 115-122, IEEE Computer Society, October 1994.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new approach to volume rendering in which curves of constant intensity, or iso-contours are computed directly for each view. The generated iso-contours can be used to drive various visualization and feature-detection algorithms. The approach imposes no restriction on the organization of the data points and can accommodate a large class of radially-symmetric filter functions. The technique works well for both perspective and orthographic viewing projections. Each iso-contour is defined by an ordinary differential equation, which is solved using a predictor-corrector method. A key element of the algorithm is the use of image intensity gradients, which we compute by means of a closed-form expression that holds at every point on the image plane. A caching algorithm is described that dramatically accelerates the gradient computations on large datasets. The algorithm is demonstrated on emission-only datasets. We conclude by describing a number of possible enhancements.

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