Efficient Volume Rendering on the Face Centered and Body Centered Cubic Grids

Abstract: In volumetric visualization, the body centered cubic grid (BCC) and its reciprocal, the face centered cubic grid (FCC), are despite their good sampling properties  not well off regarding available rendering software and tools. Described in this thesis is the development of an extension for the volume rendering engine Voreen, implementing two recently presented  GPU accelerated reconstruction algorithms for these grids, along with a simple nearest neighbor method. These reconstruction  methods replaces the trilinear reconstruction  method used for data stored in a Cartesian cubic grid (CC). The goal is for the produced software to be useful for efficiently visualizing results from experiments with the BCC and FCC grids and thus help make such data easier to observe. The performance and rendering quality of the new raycasters is measured and compared to Voreen's existing Cartesian cubic ray caster. The experimental results show that the raycasters can render data in the BCC and FCC format at interactive frame rates while maintaining comparable visual quality.