Comparing Hierarchical Data Structures for Sparse Volume Rendering with Empty Space Skipping

Abstract

Empty space skipping can be efficiently implemented with hierarchical data structures such as k-d trees and bounding volume hierarchies. This paper compares several recently published hierarchical data structures with regard to construction and rendering performance. The papers that form our prior work have primarily focused on interactively building the data structures and only showed that rendering performance is superior to using simple acceleration data structures such as uniform grids with macro cells. In the area of surface ray tracing, there exists a trade-off between construction and rendering performance of hierarchical data structures. In this paper we present performance comparisons for several empty space skipping data structures in order to determine if such a trade-off also exists for volume rendering with uniform data topologies.

Real-Time Spatiotemporal Denoising Volumetric Rendering in Three-Dimensional Visualization of Puncturing Navigation

“…Roettger et al [10] optimized this approach by terminating rays early, thus reducing the number of light calculations. Zellmann et al [11]employed empty space skipping to avoid calculations on void volumetric data, significantly reducing the computational load for ray casting. However, the ray casting, due to its simplistic lighting model considering only local illumination upon striking the volumetric data, lacks in producing high-quality images and fails to offer clear visualization of organ boundaries and depth perception.…”