HDRVolVis: High Dynamic Range Volume Visualization
Xiaoru Yuan, Minh X. Nguyen, Baoquan Chen and David H. Porter
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(4):433-455 July/August, 2006
In this paper, we present an interactive high dynamic range volume visualization framework (HDR VolVis) for visualizing volumetric data with both high spatial and intensity resolutions.

Volumes with high dynamic range values require high precision computing during the rendering process to preserve data precision. Furthermore, it is desirable to render high resolution volumes with low opacity values to reveal detailed internal structures, which also requires high precision compositing. High precision rendering will result in a high precision intermediate image (a.k.a., high dynamic range image). Simply rounding up pixel values to regular display scales will result in loss of computed details. Our method performs high precision compositing followed by dynamic tone mapping to preserve details on regular display devices.

Rendering high precision volume data requires corresponding resolution in the transfer function. To assist the users in designing a high resolution transfer function on a limited resolution display device, we propose a novel transfer function specification interface with non-linear magnification of the density range and logarithmic scaling of the color/opacity range. By leveraging modern commodity graphics hardware, multi-resolution rendering technique and out-of-core acceleration, our system can effectively produce an interactive visualization of large volume data of around 2048^3.
 

High dynamic range volume rendering result for turbulent mixing of air and Sulfur Hexafluoride(SF6).
Left: tone mapped image from high dynamic range volume rendering; right: images at different exposure levels from the same rendering.

@article{yuan06TVCG,
author = {Xiaoru Yuan and Minh X. Nguyen and Baoquan Chen and David H. Porter},
title = {HDRVolVis: High Dynamic Range Volume Visualization},
booktitle = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
year = {2006},
month = {July/August},
volume = {12}.
number = {4},
pages = {433--455},
doi = {},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
}
Xiaoru Yuan, Minh X. Nguyen, Baoquan Chen and David Porter, "HDRVolVis: High Dynamic Range Volume Visualization." IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(4):433-455 (2006).
Download:| paper | (pdf) 2.03MB |
Video: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~xyuan/HDRVis/