Adaptive Error Bracketing for Controlled-Precision Volume Rendering
by
Kevin Novins,
James Arvo, and
David Salesin.
Technical Report TR92-1312,
Cornell University Department of Computer Science,
Ithaca, New York, November 1992.
Abstract
We present a new ray tracing approach to volume rendering in which the
low-albedo volume rendering integral for each ray is efficiently computed
to any prescribed accuracy. By bracketing the emission and absorption
functions along each ray with adaptively refined step functions,
computation is directed toward large sources of error and continued until a
desired accuracy is reached. As a result, coarse approximations can be used
in regions that are nearly uniform, of low emission, or of low visibility
due to absorption by material closer to the eye. Adaptive refinement for
each ray is performed using a hierarchical organization of the volume data;
at each step, a part of the ray estimated to contribute large error is
refined, and the approximate integral is updated incrementally. Our current
implementation operates on regularly-spaced data samples combined with
trilinear interpolation; however, the concepts described apply to more
general data topologies and reconstruction filters.
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Last modified: January 1996.