Recent Advances in Massive Volume Visualization

Volumetric data sets are growing at incredible rates in terms of number and size resulting in two visualization challenges: maintaining performance and extracting meaningful information. These two challenges are closely related, since user interaction, which imposes real-time constraints, is a key to volumetric understanding. In my talk, I will present scalable methods for rendering volumes of potentially unlimited size on modern GPU architectures. Furthermore I will introduce methods to improve their understanding through illustrative techniques and presentation on advanced 3D displays. I will explain specialized multi-resolution structures and algorithms that lead to output sensitive methods whose rendering costs depend only on the complexity of the generated images and not on the complexity of the input data sets. We will see how the advanced characteristics of modern GPGPU architectures can be exploited and combined with an out-of-core framework in order to provide a more flexible, scalable and efficient implementation. In this part, I will present our latest research activity regarding compression domain volume rendering and time-varying visualizations. To improve visual perception and understanding, I will introduce the use of novel 3D display technology based on a light-field approach. This kind of device allows multiple naked-eye users to perceive virtual objects floating inside the display workspace, exploiting the stereo and horizontal parallax. I will present a set of specialized and interactive illustrative techniques capable of providing different contextual information in different areas of the display, as well as an out-of-core CUDA based ray-casting engine. The possibilities of the system have been demonstrated by the multi-user interactive exploration of 64-GVoxel data sets on a 35-MPixel light-field display driven by a cluster of PCs.

@InProceedings{Igl12,
  author       = {Iglesias Guitián, J.},
  title        = {Recent Advances in Massive Volume Visualization},
  booktitle    = {Collana seminari interni 2012},
  number       = {20120328},
  month        = {march},
  year         = {2012},
  keywords     = {volume rendering, time-varying visualization, compression, multi-resolution algorithms, 3D display, ray-casting},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2012/Igl12},
}