1. CSc4730/6730 Scientific Visualization
Lecture 25
Volume Rendering
Ying Zhu
Georgia State University

2. Outline Background Volume rendering algorithm Main references
Ray casting
Plane composition
Main references
R. A. Drebin, et al. “Volume Rendering”, Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, 1998
M. Levoy, “Volume Rendering: Display of Surfaces from Volume Data”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, May 1988

3. Background

4. What is volume rendering?
Volume is a three-dimentional array of voxels.
Just the same way an image is a 2D array of pixels.
3D images produced by CT, MRI or even mathematic scalar fields are easily represented as volumes.
Voxel is the basic element of the volume. Typical volume size may be 1283 voxels, but any other size is acceptable.
Volume Rendering means rendering the voxel-based data into viewable 2D image.

5. What is volume rendering?
Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing sampled functions of three spatial dimensions by computing 2-D projections of a colored semitransparent volume.

6. Background
The major application area of volume rendering is medical imaging
Volume data is available from X-ray Computer Tomagraphy (CT) scanners and Positron Emission Tomagraphy (PET) scanners.
CT scanners produce three-dimensional stacks of parallel plane images, each of which consist of an array of X-ray absorption coefficients.

7. Background
Typically X-ray CT images will have a resolution of 512 * 512 * 12 bits and there will be up to 50 slides in a stack.
The slides are 1-5 mm thick, and are spaced 1-5 mm apart.

8. Background
In the two-dimensional domain, these slides can be viewed one at a time.
The advantage of CT images over conventional X-ray images is that they only contain information from that one plane.
A conventional X-ray image, on the other hand, contains information from all the planes, and the result is an accumulation of shadows that are a function of the density of the tissue, bone, organs, etc., anything that absorbs the X-rays.

9. Background
The availability of the stacks of parallel data produced by CT scanners prompted the development of techniques for viewing the data as a three-dimensional field rather than as individual planes.
This gave the immediate advantage that the information could be viewed from any view point.

10. Background Disadvantages of Marching Cubes algorithm
It requires that a binary decision be made on the position of the intermediate surface that is extracted and rendered.
Also, extracting an intermediate structure can cause false positive (artifacts that do not exist) and false negatives (discarding small or poorly defined features).

11. Background
The basic goal of volume rendering is to allow the best use of the three-dimensional data and not attempt to impose any geometric structure on it.
It solves one of the most important limitations of surface extraction techniques, namely the way in which they display a projection of a thin shell in the acquisition space.

12. Background
Surface extraction techniques fail to take into account that, particularly in medical imaging, data may originate from fluid and other materials which may be partially transparent and should be modeled as such.
Volume rendering doesn't suffer from this limitation.

13. Why Volume Rendering? Pros: Natural representation of CT/MRI images.
Transparency effects (Fire, Smoke…).
High quality
Cons:
Huge data sets
Computationally expensive.
Cannot be embedded easily into polygonal scene

14. Rendering Methods
There are two categories of volume rendering algorithms:
1. Ray casting algorithms (Object Order)
Basic ray-casting
Using octrees
2. Plane Composing (Image Order)
Basic slicing
Shear-Warp factorization
Transparent textures

15. Ray Casting
Ray casting is a method in which for every pixel in the image, a ray is cast through the volume.
The ray intersects a line of voxels.
While passing, the color of the pixel is accumulated acording the voxels’ color and transperacy.
Basic Comlexity = Depth * ImageSize

16. Ray casting
“Additive reprojection" projects voxels along a certain viewing direction.
Intensities of voxels along parallel viewing rays are projected to provide an intensity in the viewing plane.
Voxels of a specified depth can be assigned a maximum opacity, so that the depth that the volume is visualized to can be controlled.
This provides several useful features:
The volume can be visualized from any direction.
Hidden surface removal can be implemented so that, for example, front ribs can obscure back ribs.
Color can be used to enhance interpretation.

17. Ray casting
Additive reprojection uses a lighting model which is a combination of reflected and transmitted light from the voxel.

18. Ray casting In this figure, the outgoing light is made up of:
light reflected in the view direction from the light source
incoming light filtered by the voxel
any light emitted by the voxel

19. Ray casting Several different algorithms for ray casting exist.
Here we describe the implementation presented by Marc Levoy
For every pixel in the output image, a ray is shot into the data volume.
At a predetermined number of evenly spaced locations along the ray the color and opacity values are obtained by interpolation.
The interpolated colors and opacities are then merged with each other and with the background by compositing in either front-to-back or back-to-front order to yield the color of the pixel.

20. Visualization pipeline
Levoy describes his technique as consisting of two pipelines - a visualization pipeline and a classification pipeline.
The output produced by these two pipelines is then combined using volumetric compositing to produce the final image.
In the visualization pipeline the volume data is shaded.
Every voxel in the data is given a shade using a local gradient approximation to obtain a "voxel normal."
This normal is then used as input into a standard Phong shading model to obtain an intensity.
The output from this pipeline is a three color component intensity for every voxel in the data set.

21. Classification pipeline
The classification pipeline associates an opacity with each voxel.
The color parameters which are used in the shading model are also used in this pipeline.
The classification of opacity is context dependent, and the application of Levoy's technique is in X-ray CT images (where each voxel represents an X-ray absorption coefficient).

22. The classification of opacity
Classification of opacity in Levoy’s paper

23. The classification of opacity
We now have two values associates with each voxel:
C(X) - a shade calculated from a reflection model using the local gradient
α(X) - an opacity derived from tissue type of known CT values
The next stage, volumetric compositing, produces a two-dimensional projection of these values in the view plane.

24. Ray casting
Rays are cast from the eye to the voxel, and the values of C(X) and α(X) are "combined" into single values to provide a final pixel intensity.

25. Ray casting
For a single voxel along a ray, the standard transparency formula is:
where:
Cout is the outgoing intensity/color for voxel X along the ray
Cinis the incoming intensity for the voxel
It is possible to interpolate from the vertex values of the voxel which the ray passes through, but it's better to consider neighboring voxels (8 or 26) and trilinearly interpolate.
This yields values that lie exactly along the ray.

26. Ray casting pseudocode

27. Ray Casting - Performance Improvements
Use of Octrees
Minimizes the number transparent voxels during the accumulation, since a group of transparent voxels may be represented as a single node in the octree.
More efficient memory usage.
Interleaving methods
Sample every two (n) voxels as long as voxels are fully transparent.
Sample only ¼ of the points in the image and interpolate - Faster for interactive mode, but less quality.
Pyramids, k-d trees and other data-structures.

28. Ray Casting - Improving Image Quality
Multi Cast or Super Sampling:
Instead of sampling one ray per pixel, sampling 4 rays per pixel.
Better image... but four times longer to render.
Ray subdividing:
Used with perspective projection.
When the rays draw away from each other, the sampling of the volume is not complete.
The solution is to divide the ray when the rays density falls.

29. Plane Composing
The plane composing (or “slicing”) method, divides the volume into slices.
During the rendering process, the slices are composes one over the other, producing the image Basic Complexity = Volume_Size

30. Plane Composing
The slicing method works best in the case of parallel projection and the volume edge is parallel to the view plane.
In this case, the voxels can be accessed easily as planes in the volume.
However, when the view-plane is not parallel to the volume, a more complicated sampling algorithm is needed.
Since a voxel is not projected onto one pixel, a filter should be used for the composition.

31. Plane Composing
The planes composing may be done from the rear side forwards, or front side backwards.

32. Plane Composing - Performance Improvements
Shear-warp factorization of the viewing matrix.
Information of min-max non-transparent voxels.
Again, interleaving methods
Sample only half of the planes.
Sample only ¼ of the points in the image...
Use the graphics hardware
Sending the volume planes one by one as transparent textures to the graphics card
Back to front
Use 3D texturing technique to render the image

33. Examples
Characteristics of datasets

34. Jaw with skin

35. Jaw without skin

36. Ribonuclease

37. Head

38. Rendering times

39. Brute force

40. Heirarchical enumeration

41. Heirarchical enumeration and adaptive termination

42. Isosurface vs. Volume Rendering

43. Surface graphics
Surface graphics generates computer images based on surface primitives (polygon meshes, smooth patches …) for object (boundary) representations
Marching cube algorithm

44. Surface graphics Advantages Disadvantages
Abstraction of object gemetry
Continuous representation
Work well with light-material interaction
Hardware acceleration
Disadvantages
Sensitive to scene complexity
Sensitive to object complexity
Texture mapping can be tricky
No interior/volume information

45. Volume graphics
Volume graphics refers to the rendering techniques that generate images directly from volume datasets (e.g. MRI, CT data)
A volume-sampled plane within a volumetric terrain (image courtesy of A. Kaufman)

46. Volume graphics Advantages Insensitive to scene complexity
Insensitive to object complexity
Work well for 3D texture mapping
Can model volume densities, inhomogeneous materials and amorphous phenomena
Support constructive solid geometry (CSG)

47. Volume graphics Discrete representation generates aliasing
Involve more complicated light-material interaction
Require large memory
Require intensive computation and thus high computing power
Lack of geometry information (boundary)

48. References
R. A. Drebin, et al. “Volume Rendering”, Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, 1988
M. Levoy, “Volume Rendering: Display of Surfaces from Volume Data”, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, May 1988
K. Frenkel, Volume Rendering, Communications of the ACM, 32(4), 1989, pp