Volume rendering

Volume rendering is a technique for directly displaying a sampled 3D scalar field without first fitting geometric primitives to the samples. We are working on developing efficient and accurate algorithms for displaying this sort of data. Our goal is photorealistic real-time volume rendering of usefully large scientific, engineering, and medical datasets on affordable noncustom hardware. We have also worked on techniques for morphing volumes.

The project represented by this web page has been inactive for several years. However, there are two new efforts related to volume rendering that are currently going on in our laboratory. The first is a project to incorporate volume rendering into the Stanford Real-Time Programmable Shading Language and to build a parallelized volume renderer for our 32-processor PC cluster. This project is under the direction of Pat Hanrahan. The second is a project to create a book of volume renderings, tentatively called Volumegraphica. Here is a talk about that sabbatical-style project, which is still incomplete in 2021.

People:

Recent papers in this area:

Real-Time Volume Rendering on Shared Memory Multiprocessors Using the Shear-Warp Factorization
Philippe Lacroute
Proc. 1995 Parallel Rendering Symposium
Feature-Based Volume Metamorphosis
Apostolos Lerios, Chase D. Garfinkle, and Marc Levoy
Proc. SIGGRAPH '95
Fast Volume Rendering Using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing Transformation
Philippe Lacroute and Marc Levoy
Proc. SIGGRAPH '94
Frequency Domain Volume Rendering
Takashi Totsuka and Marc Levoy
Proc. SIGGRAPH '93

Some older papers:

Display of Surfaces from Volume Data
Marc Levoy
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 8, No., 3, May, 1988
Click here for an historical note about the error in this paper
A Hybrid Ray Tracer for Rendering Polygon and Volume Data
Marc Levoy
IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Vol. 10, No. 2, March, 1990, pp. 33-40.
Efficient Ray Tracing of Volume Data
Marc Levoy/a>
ACM Transactions on Graphics Vol. 9, No. 3, July, 1990, pp. 245-261.
Volume Rendering by Adaptive Refinement
Marc Levoy
The Visual Computer, Vol. 6, No. 1, February, 1990, pp. 2-7.
Volume Rendering in Radiation Treatment Planning
Marc Levoy et al.,
Proc. First Conference on Visualization in Biomedical Computing, IEEE Computer Society Press, Atlanta, Georgia, May, 1990, pp. 4-10.

Available software and data:

Demos:


If images on this page look dark to you, see our note about gamma correction.

A list of technical papers, with abstracts and pointers to additional information, is also available. Or you can return to the research projects page or our home page.


Copyright © 1995 Marc Levoy
Last update: May 10, 2021 06:40:22 PM