Enhancing real-time focus and context direct volume rendering

Abstract

Direct volume rendering is a challenging problem both due to the technical difficulty of displaying large volume datasets on limited hardware and due to the difficulty of rendering such complex information in a manner which is easy for a user to understand. Furthermore, the complexity of volume data and the continued increase in rendering demands makes real-time volume rendering an increasingly challenging problem. Focus and context volume visualisation attempts to solve both these problems by allowing the user to specify a focus area in the data which is displayed in high quality while the surrounding data is abstracted but sufficiently retained to provide context. This approach allows for a reduction in rendering complexity in the context region of the data, thus allowing for faster speeds. In addition, this two-level focus and context approach allows for increased understanding of the dataset.