Volume navigation is a method of moving view point in 3D volume space. For smooth movement, navigation system must keep interactive frame rate. However, the principal drawback of volume rendering is its long computation time. The advent of 3D texture mapping hardware in general graphics workstations has accelerated volume rendering successfully, but the previous methods are not well optimized for large volume datasets.
In this thesis, we propose an optimization method, called brick merging algorithm, for rendering large volume with 3D texture mapping hardware. The brick merging algorithm takes multiresolutional volumetric dataset and uses graphics hardware optimally, reducing number of brick, which represent whole volume. For the volume navigation, the rendering speed is more important than the image quality. Thus we propose a navigation control algorithm which enables interactive volume navigation, maintaining uniform rendering time by control the number of brick.
Several experiments show that the brick merging algorithm accelerates rendering large volume 1~4 times faster for every view point. The navigation control algorithm can render several frames per second for volume navigation without much degradation of image quality.
