3D Volumetric Data Fields Process And Volume Rendering

This thesis describes the author's work on 3D volumetric data fields process and volume rendering, including basic algorithms and software systems.As science and technology develop quickly, more and more data are acquired for studying and analysing. The data coming from super-computers, satellites, aircrafts, geographic equipments, and medical scanners, are increased all the days, and far beyond the analytical ability of human. The visualization of 3D data field as well as the interactive processing of such data becomes more and more urgent. In order to find more efficient method to display the graphics converted from computed data on screen, more and more scientific researchers join the research work on the process of 3D data field.The rendering of 3D volumetric data fields is a hot research area in scientific visualization, and it is also a key technology in practical applications. The volume visualization algorithms can be divided into surface rendering and direct volume rendering (volume rendering for short).Marching Cubes (MC) algorithm is a classical algorithm based on extracting iso-surface from regular volume data. And an improvement has been made on an ambiguous problem in MC algorithm. Marching Tetrahedra (MT) algorithm is an improved one from MC algorithm. This thesis studies these two algorithms in detail, with which the 3D regular volume data can be extracted to construct the 3D surface models.In the research of volume rendering algorithm, the author mainly studied ray casting algorithm. An efficient volume rendering algorithms is developed by using Bounding-box technology. A volume visualization system, which is based on the developed algorithm, is designed using MS C++ with some primary result presented in this thesis.