State-of-the-art in 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 factors, especially for massive, time-varying or multi-volume visualization, as well as 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 to adhere to 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 sampling grid layouts, compact representation models, compression techniques, GPU ren- dering architectures and fast decoding techniques.

@Article{BGIMMPS14,
  author       = {Balsa Rodriguez, M. and Gobbetti, E. and Iglesias Guitián, J. and Makhinya, M. and Marton, F. and Pajarola, R. and Suter, S.},
  title        = {State-of-the-art in Compressed GPU-Based Direct Volume Rendering},
  journal      = {Computer Graphics Forum},
  year         = {2014},
  publisher    = {Blackwell Publishing Ltd},
  note         = {to appear},
  keywords     = {gpu computing, compression, volume rendering},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2014/BGIMMPS14},
}