Efficient and Accurate Volume Rendering on Face-Centered and Body-Centered Cubic Grids

Abstract: The body centered cubic grid (BCC) and face centered cubic grid (FCC) offer improved sampling properties when compared to the cartesian grid. Despite this there is little software and hardware support for volume rendering of data stored in one of these grids. This project is a continuation of a project adding support for such grids to the volume rendering engine Voreen. This project has three aims. Firstly, to implement new interpolation methods capable of rendering at interactive frame rates. Secondly, to improve the software by adding an alternate volume storage format offering improved frame rates for BCC methods. And thirdly, because of the issues when comparing image quality between different grid types due to aliasing, to implement a method unbiased in terms of post-aliasing. The existing methods are compared to the newly implemented ones in terms of frame rate and image quality and the results show that the new volume format improve the frame rate significantly, that the new BCC interpolation method offers similar image quality at better performance compared to existing methods and that the unbiased method produces images of good quality at the expense of speed.