Real-time deblocked GPU rendering of compressed volumes

The wide majority of current state-of-the-art compressed GPU volume renderers are based on block-transform coding, which is susceptible to blocking artifacts, particularly at low bit-rates. In this paper we address the problem for the first time, by introducing a specialized deferred filtering architecture working on block-compressed data and including a novel deblocking algorithm. The architecture efficiently performs high quality shading of massive datasets by closely coordinating visibility- and resolution-aware adaptive data loading with GPU-accelerated per-frame data decompression, deblocking, and rendering. A thorough evaluation including quantitative and qualitative measures demonstrates the performance of our approach on large static and dynamic datasets including a massive $512^4$ turbulence simulation (256GB), which is aggressively compressed to less than $2$ GB, so as to fully upload it on graphics board and to explore it in real-time during animation.

@InProceedings{MIDG14,
  author       = {Marton, F. and Iglesias Guitián, J. and Diaz, J. and Gobbetti, E.},
  title        = {Real-time deblocked GPU rendering of compressed volumes},
  booktitle    = {Proc. 19th International Workshop on Vision, Modeling and Visualization (VMV)},
  year         = {2014},
  keywords     = {volume rendering, compression, GPU rendering},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2014/MIDG14},
}