Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	A Uniform Hardware-Accelerated Adaptive EWA Splatting Algorithm
Authors	CHEN Wei1) XIA Jia-Zhi1) ZHANG Long2) YU Yang1) ZHENG Wen-Ting1) PENG Qun-Sheng1)
Address	1)(State Key Laboratory of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058) 2)(Institute of Graphics and Image, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018)
Year	2009
Issue	No.8(1571—1581)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract This paper presents a novel framework for hardware-accelerated adaptive EWA (elliptical weighted average) Splatting. EWA Splatting combines a Gaussian reconstruction kernel with a low-pass image filter for high image quality without aliasing artifacts or excessive blurring. This paper introduces an efficient adaptive filtering scheme to reduce the computational cost of high quality EWA Splatting, and shows how to compute the EWA Splat primitives for volume data and for point-sampled surface data on modern graphics processing units (GPUs). To accelerate the rendering, the splat geometry and data attributes are assembled locally in video memory. For adaptive EWA volume Splatting, it proposes three data storage modes and several advanced features including interactive classification, hybrid surface-volume rendering and adaptive floating-point accumulation. The current implementation renders 15~20 millions primitives in a consumer PC. Several results for rectilinear volume data and point-sampled surfaces demonstrate the high image quality and interactive rendering speed of the proposed approach. Keywords volume rendering; point-based rendering; Splatting; EWA filter; anti-aliasing; hardware acceleration Background To interactively process large-scale point clouds, a high efficient point rendering method has to be exploited. Most efforts have focused on direct display of point samples without connectivity, of which splatting is the dominant solution. As splatting is concerned, two aspects must be considered. On one hand, high performance is a major consideration for many time-critical applications. On the other hand, visually plausible image quality requires special cares because Splatting processes the rendering primitives in an individual manner. This paper is following the authors’ former work. It presents a hardware-accelerated EWA volume splatting framework that allows interactive high quality volume rendering, interactive transfer function design, and hybrid surface-volume splatting. The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.60503056.