A Survey of Compressed GPU-based Direct Volume Rendering

Great advancements in commodity graphics hardware have favored GPU-based volume rendering as the main adopted solution for interactive exploration of rectilinear scalar volumes on commodity platforms. Nevertheless, long data transfer times and GPU memory size limitations are often the main limiting factor, especially for massive, time-varying, or multi-volume visualization or for networked visualization on the emerging mobile devices. To address this issue, a variety of level-of-detail data representations and compression techniques have been introduced. In order to improve capabilities and performance over the entire storage, distribution, and rendering pipeline, the encoding/decoding process is typically highly asymmetric, and systems should ideally compress at data production time and decompress on demand at rendering time. Compression and level-of-detail pre-computation does not have real-time constraints and can be performed off-line for high quality results. In contrast, adaptive real-time rendering from compressed representations requires fast, transient, and spatially independent decompression. In this report, we review the existing compressed GPU volume rendering approaches, covering compact representation models, compression techniques, GPU rendering architectures and fast decoding techniques.

@InProceedings{BGIMPS13,
  author       = {Balsa Rodriguez, M. and Gobbetti, E. and Iglesias Guitián, J. and Marton, F. and Pajarola, R. and Suter, S.},
  title        = {A Survey of Compressed GPU-based Direct Volume Rendering},
  booktitle    = {Eurographics State-of-the-art Report},
  month        = {april},
  year         = {2013},
  keywords     = {Volume Rendering, Compression, GPU rendering},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2013/BGIMPS13},
}