Browsing by Author "Schulze-Döbold, Jürgen Peter"

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    Interactive volume rendering in virtual environments
    (2003) Schulze-Döbold, Jürgen Peter; Ertl, Thomas (Prof. Dr.)
    This dissertation is about the interactive visualization of volume data in virtual environments. Only data on regular grids will be discussed. Research was conducted on three major topics: visualization algorithms, user interfaces, and parallelization of the visualization algorithms. Because the shear-warp algorithm is a very fast CPU-based volume rendering algorithm, it was investigated how it could be adapted to the characteristics of virtual environments. This required the support of perspective projection, as well as specific developments for interactive work, for instance a variable frame rate or the application of clipping planes. Another issue was the improvement of image quality by the utilization of pre-integration for the compositing. Concerning the user interface, a transfer function editor was created, which was tailored to the conditions of virtual environments. It should be usable as intuitively as possible, even with imprecise input devices or low display resolutions. Further research was done in the field of direct interaction, for instance a detail probe was developed which is useful to look inside of a dataset. In order to run the user interface on a variety of output devices, a device independent menu and widget system was developed. The shear-warp algorithm was accelerated by a parallelization which is based on MPI. For the actual volume rendering, a remote parallel computer can be employed, which needs to be linked to the display computer via a network connection. Because the image transfer turned out to be the bottleneck of this solution, it is compressed before being transferred. Furthermore, it will be described how all the above developments were combined to a volume rendering system, and how they were integrated into an existing visualization toolkit.