VIZARD II: A Reconfigurable Interactive Volume Rendering System
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Date
2002
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
This paper presents a reconfigurable, hardware accelerated, volume rendering system for high quality perspective ray casting. The volume rendering accelerator performs ray casting by calculating the path of the ray through the volume using a programmable Xilinx Virtex FPGA which provides fast design changes and low cost development. Volume datasets are stored on the card in low profile DIMMs with standard connectors allowing both, large datasets up to 1 GByte with 32 bit per voxel, and easy upgrades to larger memory capacities. Per-sample Phong shading and post-classification is performed in hardware, giving immediate feedback to changes in the visualization of a dataset. Adding new features, such as pre-integrated classification, can be accomplished using the existing card without expensive and time consuming redesigns. The card can also be used for medical image reconstruction by reconfiguring the FPGA broadening its usefulness for end users. For the first time, users are able to generate high quality perspective images as required for applications such as virtual endoscopy and colonoscopy, and stereoscopic image generation.
Description
@inproceedings{10.2312:EGGH/EGGH02/137-146,
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware},
editor = {Thomas Ertl and Wolfgang Heidrich and Michael Doggett},
title = {{VIZARD II: A Reconfigurable Interactive Volume Rendering System}},
author = {Meißner, M. and Kanus, U. and Wetekam, G. and Hirche, J. and Ehlert, A. and Straßer, W. and Doggett, M. and Forthmann, P. and Proksa, R.},
year = {2002},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-3471},
ISBN = {1-58113-580-1},
DOI = {10.2312/EGGH/EGGH02/137-146}
}