Acceleration of template-based ray casting for volume visualization using FPGAs

Volume visualization is used heavily to view simulated or collected data sets in such applications as medical imaging, computational fluid dynamics, and climate modeling. However, software and low-cost hardware implementations of visualization algorithms do not have sufficient performance for interactive viewing. This paper discusses methods for low-cost, hardware acceleration of volume visualization using a PC-hosted FPGA board. Our methods focus on volume rendering approaches, since these techniques are widely used and are computationally expensive; our primary method uses a template-based, ray-casting algorithm. This hardware implementation is substantially faster than a software-only version running on the host PC.