A Real-Time Perspective Volume Rendering using the GPU Multi-pass Acceleration Technique : Application to Virtual Colonoscopy

概要

論文の詳細を見る
The recent advancement in graphics processing unit (GPU) has enabled a direct volume rendering at interactive rates. However, a conventional way to accelerate CPU-based volume rendering cannot be directly applied to accelerate GPU-based volume rendering due to the architectural difference between CPU and GPU. In this paper, we propose the GPU multi-pass acceleration technique for a real-time perspective volume rendering method. The empty space searching and ray propagation step of volume data is divided into each processing pass in graphics hardware. By this multi-pass approach, we avoid the conditional branch, which causes a lot of computational burdens. Furthermore, the performance can be improved by the load balancing between graphics hardware and CPU. Experiments were performed to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme. The experimental result shows that our method is more than six times faster than conventional method. The performance of our method is sufficient for real-time navigation in virtual colonoscopy. The proposed method can be successfully applied to help diagnosing the colon cancer in virtual colonoscopy.
社団法人電子情報通信学会の論文
2007-01-19