Accelerating Unstructured Volume Rendering with Joint Bilateral
Upsampling
Steven P. Callahan and Claudio T. Silva
Normal volume rendering (left) compared with 8x upsampling with our filter (right)
Abstract: We present an image-space acceleration technique that allows
real-time direct volume rendering of large unstructured volumes. Our algorithm
operates as a simple post-process and can be used to improve the performance of
any existing volume renderer that is sensitive to image size. A joint
bilateral upsampling filter allows images to be rendered efficiently at a
fraction of their original size, then upsampled at a high quality using
properties that can be quickly computed from the volume. We show how our
acceleration technique can be efficiently implemented with current GPUs and
used as a post-process for a wide range of volume rendering algorihtms and
volumetric datasets.
Technical Report (pdf)
Shader source code (.zip)