research-article

An Order of Magnitude Faster Isosurface Rendering in Software on a PC than Using Dedicated, General Purpose Rendering Hardware

Authors:

George J. Grevera,

Jayaram K. Udupa,

Dewey OdhnerAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Volume 6, Issue 4

Pages 335 - 345

https://doi.org/10.1109/2945.895878

Published: 01 October 2000 Publication History

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to compare the speed of isosurface rendering in software with that using dedicated hardware. Input data consist of 10 different objects from various parts of the body and various modalities (CT, MR, and MRA) with a variety of surface sizes (up to 1 million voxels/2 million triangles) and shapes. The software rendering technique consists of a particular method of voxel-based surface rendering, called shell rendering. The hardware method is OpenGL-based and uses the surfaces constructed from our implementation of the Marching Cubes algorithm. The hardware environment consists of a variety of platforms, including a Sun Ultra I with a Creator3D graphics card and a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine II, both with polygon rendering hardware, and a 300Mhz Pentium PC. The results indicate that the software method (shell rendering) was 18 to 31 times faster than any hardware rendering methods. This work demonstrates that a software implementation of a particular rendering algorithm (shell rendering) can outperform dedicated hardware. We conclude that, for medical surface visualization, expensive dedicated hardware engines are not required. More importantly, available software algorithms (shell rendering) on a 300Mhz Pentium PC outperform the speed of rendering via hardware engines by a factor of 18 to 31.

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Cited By

Vigo MPla NAyala DMartínez J(2012)Efficient algorithms for boundary extraction of 2D and 3D orthogonal pseudomanifoldsGraphical Models10.1016/j.gmod.2012.03.00474:3(61-74)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.gmod.2012.03.004
Rodríguez JCruz IVergés EAyala D(2011)A connected-component-labeling-based approach to virtual porosimetryGraphical Models10.1016/j.gmod.2011.06.00173:5(296-310)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.gmod.2011.06.001
Imielinska CPrzekwas ATan X(2006)Multi-scale modeling of trauma injuryProceedings of the 6th international conference on Computational Science - Volume Part IV10.1007/11758549_110(822-830)Online publication date: 28-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11758549_110
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Index Terms

An Order of Magnitude Faster Isosurface Rendering in Software on a PC than Using Dedicated, General Purpose Rendering Hardware
1. Applied computing
  1. Document management and text processing
    1. Document capture
      1. Graphics recognition and interpretation
2. Computing methodologies
  1. Computer graphics
    1. Image manipulation
    2. Rendering

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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Volume 6, Issue 4

October 2000

99 pages

ISSN:1077-2626

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Copyright © Copyright © 2000 IEEE. All Rights Reserved.

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IEEE Educational Activities Department

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2000

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Cited By

Vigo MPla NAyala DMartínez J(2012)Efficient algorithms for boundary extraction of 2D and 3D orthogonal pseudomanifoldsGraphical Models10.1016/j.gmod.2012.03.00474:3(61-74)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.gmod.2012.03.004
Rodríguez JCruz IVergés EAyala D(2011)A connected-component-labeling-based approach to virtual porosimetryGraphical Models10.1016/j.gmod.2011.06.00173:5(296-310)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.gmod.2011.06.001
Imielinska CPrzekwas ATan X(2006)Multi-scale modeling of trauma injuryProceedings of the 6th international conference on Computational Science - Volume Part IV10.1007/11758549_110(822-830)Online publication date: 28-May-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11758549_110
Zhang HNewman T(2003)Efficient Parallel Out-of-core Isosurface ExtractionProceedings of the 2003 IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Large-Data Visualization and Graphics10.1109/PVGS.2003.1249036Online publication date: 20-Oct-2003
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/PVGS.2003.1249036
Bullitt EAylward S(2001)Volume Rendering of Segmented Tubular ObjectsProceedings of the 4th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention10.5555/646924.711149(161-168)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2001
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/646924.711149

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