Fast volume rendering using a shear-warp factorization of the viewing transformation

Several existing volume rendering algorithms operate by factoring the viewing transformation into a 3D shear parallel to the data slices, a projection to form an intermediate but distorted image, and a 2D warp to form an undistorted final image. We extend this class of algorithms in three ways. First, we describe a new object-order rendering algorithm based on the factorization that is significantly faster than published algorithms with minimal loss of image quality. Shear-warp factorizations have the property that rows of voxels in the volume are aligned with rows of pixels in the intermediate image. We use this fact to construct a scanline-based algorithm that traverses the volume and the intermediate image in synchrony, taking advantage of the spatial coherence present in both. We use spatial data structures based on run-length encoding for both the volume and the intermediate image. Our implementation running on an SGI Indigo workstation renders a 256³ voxel medical data set in one second. Our second extension is a shear-warp factorization for perspective viewing transformations, and we show how our rendering algorithm can support this extension. Third, we introduce a data structure for encoding spatial coherence in unclassified volumes (i.e. scalar fields with no precomputed opacity). When combined with our shear-warp rendering algorithm this data structure allows us to classify and render a 256³ voxel volume in three seconds. The method extends to support mixed volumes and geometry and is parallelizable.