Texture-mapping hardware has been successfully exploited for volume rendering. In this paper, we propose algorithms for texture-based volume rendering accelerated by texture hulls that avoid the transferring and compositing of empty voxels. We have developed methods that efficiently find all the bounding rectangles of the non-empty regions as well as the bounding contours that more accurately describe the borders of the non-empty regions. The bounding shapes are treated as the hulls of the non-empty sub-textures. Texels outside the hulls are skipped for storing and rendering. With our accelerations, the rendering speed is 2 to 12 times faster for a variety of data sets.
['Wei Li', 'Arie E. Kaufman']
Accelerating volume rendering with texture hulls