"There is much pleasure in useless knowledge." — Bertrand Russell
Volume Rendering: Going boldly where all have gone before…
Image from CT data downloaded from http://graphics.stanford.edu/data/voldata/
Okay, this is a bit gruesome, but I’ve been dusting off some old papers that I never really understood on Fourier Volume Rendering, and testing my understanding by writing some simple code that takes in a volume dataset and uses the fast Fourier transform to convert it into simulated X-ray pictures. The data set that this picture was generated from was downloaded from this webpage at Stanford, and consists of CT scan data of a cadaver. The basic code works! Given a bit more work, I should be able to do arbitrary orthographic views.
The math for all this is described quite admirably by Tom Malzbender’s paper Fourier Volume Rendering.
Addendum3: Here’s my attempt at rotation. It doesn’t really work right yet. I think I understand why.
One thought on “Volume Rendering: Going boldly where all have gone before…”
stefanbanev
GPU fits perfectly well for this technique; you may get order of magnitude speedup comparatively with i7 920. Shading is non-trivial for FVR but possible. Arbitrary cut planes, arbitrary classification (especially multiple), fly-through etc…, such tool set essential to build even rudimentary VR WS is unknown for FVR; I have no doubts that this is possible but still nobody did it; you may be the first, good luck….
GPU fits perfectly well for this technique; you may get order of magnitude speedup comparatively with i7 920. Shading is non-trivial for FVR but possible. Arbitrary cut planes, arbitrary classification (especially multiple), fly-through etc…, such tool set essential to build even rudimentary VR WS is unknown for FVR; I have no doubts that this is possible but still nobody did it; you may be the first, good luck….
Regards,
Stefan