GPU-Based Direct Volume Rendering

The Direct Volume Rendering (DVR) technology has been widely used these years in all kinds of the fields which need 3D volume visualization, including medicine, physics and engineering. Many rendering effects with high precision have to be realized in high-end graphical station by the restriction of hardware. But with the development of graphic hardware, the DVR on the PC can also realize high-quality 3D reconstructed effects.In this paper, several real-time volume rendering algorithms based on the brand new programmable Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) were presented. The complete implements were also described. The strong point and the weak point of the traditional texture-based algorithms were compared with the presented algorithms by rendering quality and speed. The experiment proved that the presented algorithm has better shading effects than the traditional algorithm.As the GPU has the parallel and computation-specified architecture, its float-point operation speed is much higher than CPU. The presented GPU-based 3D texture algorithm implement the traditional texture-based algorithm in GPU by writing vertex program and fragment program. The...