High performance presence-accelerated ray casting

We present a novel presence acceleration for volumetric ray casting. A highly accurate estimation for object presence is obtained by projecting all grid cells associated with the object boundary on the image plane. Memory space and access time are reduced by run-length encoding of the boundary cells, while boundary cell projection time is reduced by exploiting projection templates and multiresolution volumes. Efforts have also been made towards a fast perspective projection as well as interactive classification. We further present task partitioning schemes for effective parallelization of both boundary cell projection and ray traversal procedures. Good load balancing has been reached by taking full advantage of both the optimizations in the serial rendering algorithm and shared-memory architecture. Our experimental results on a 16-processor SGI Power Challenge have shown interactive rendering rates for 256/sup 3/ volumetric data sets at 10-30 Hz. We describe the theory and implementation of our algorithm, and shows its superiority over the shear-warp factorization approach.