Design And Implementation Of A Volume Visualization Platform VISU

Volume Visualization is the main branch of Scientific Visualization, which process, transfer, operate and visualize the volume data produced from various scanners ,experiment or computing model. The goal of volume visualization is to know the complex structure of volume data clearly.Volume visualization system effectively analyzes the volume data based on the algorithms of visualization, which can be used in medicine, geology, industry, avigation and scientific computing fields. The design and implementation of volume visualization system is the main part of research in visualization application.Nowadays, there are mainly two ideas for the design of volume visualization system. Because most of the volume visualization system users don't care the details of system architecture and the design method, they just take the system as a tool of data visualization. Friendly MMI (man-machine interface) and convenient operation is the main design goal for such kind of system. But just because this kind of system often construct fixed visualization pipeline, it only can be used in a specific field. For professional researchers, extendibility and modularization of system is necessary because they need to easily construct various visualization pipelines according to different visualization requirement.This paper proposed a novel design idea for?volume visualization platform.?This platform was designed?using?Object-Oriented system analysis and design techniques, and was implemented based on the advanced visualization toolkit (VTK), which was also introduced here.?This platform not only can visualize 3D scalar regular volume data but also provide a set of generic modules to construct specific visualization pipeline for various application.In this paper, firstly the idea of platform design was introduced, then the overall system architecture and dataflow diagram were illustrated. The function of 2D/3D image processing, 3D scene, surface rendering and volume rendering is represented.Sequently a number of functional tests?results were listed. Our experimental results show that this platform is not only an effective tool for 3D volume visualization and interaction which can be run on windows or Linux, but also provides a?variety of extensible, usable modules?for setting?up a?visualization pipeline?for?other special applications.Finally the experiences of platform design were summarizes. The future work for the platform VISU was also proposed.