A parallel volume rendering method for massive data

Due to the limited memory capacity of current mainstream personal computer, increasing the volume rendering speed for massive 3D image data is a real challenge, especially for producing a high resolution output image. To achieve fast full-resolution volume rendering for the massive 3D data, a novel parallel volume rendering method based on ray casting is presented in this paper. Firstly, the original data is partitioned into sub-blocks. Then an occlusion relationship graph of all the sub-blocks is established, and a kind of topological sorting method is performed on this graph to find all the groups of sub-blocks without occlusion relationship. Finally, all the groups of sub-blocks are rendered by using a volume ray caster implemented on GPU, which renders the sub-blocks of each group in parallel. The experimental results indicate that the new method is effective and efficient for the volume visualization of massive 3D image data.