Ray-cast volume rendering accelerated by incremental trilinear interpolation and cell templates

Two related ideas for improving the speed of ray-cast volume rendering are studied in this paper. The first is an incremental algorithm for trilinear interpolation, a method commonly used in ray-cast volume rendering to calculate sample values. The incremental algorithm can expedite trilinear interpolation when many samples along a ray are located in one cell. The second is an efficient hybrid volume rendering restricted to parallel projection. In the preprocessing stage, a cell template is created to store the information used by the incremental trilinear interpolation. When a cell is parallel projected, the information is retrieved from the template to compute the cell contribution. Because the algorithm with only one template may cause aliasing, an antialiasing technique exploiting multiple cell templates is proposed. With our method, ray-cast volume rendering can be accelerated considerably.