ShellSplatting: Interactive Rendering of Anisotropic Volumes

This work presents an extension of shell rendering that is more flexible and yields higher quality volume renderings. Shell rendering consists of efficient data-structures and methods to manipulate and render structures with non-precise boundaries in volume data. We have updated these algorithms by creating an implementation that makes effective use of ubiquitously available commercial graphics hardware. More significantly , we have extended the algorithm to make use of elliptical Gaussian splats instead of straightforward voxel projection. This dramatically increases the quality of the renderings, especially with anisotropically sampled volumes. The use of the graphics hardware alleviates the performance penalty of using splats.

@InProceedings { BP03a,
  author       = "Botha, Charl P. and Post, Frits H.",
  title        = "ShellSplatting: Interactive Rendering of Anisotropic Volumes",
  booktitle    = "Data Visualization 2003 (Proceedings of Joint Eurographics - IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization)",
  year         = "2003",
  editor       = "G.-P. Bonneau and S. Hahmann and C. D. Hansen",
  publisher    = "ACM SigGraph",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2003/BP03a"
}