Interactive Exploration of Remote Isosurfaces with Point-Based Non-Photorealistic Rendering

Abstract

We present a non-photorealistic rendering technique for interactive exploration of isosurfaces generated from remote volumetric data. Instead of relying on the conventional smooth shading technique to render the isosurfaces, a point-based technique is used to represent and render the isosurfaces in a remote client-server environment. The non-photorealistic nature of the proposed rendering method enables the server to transmit only the essential surface features, which substantially reduces the network traffic. The algorithm also utilizes frame coherence and efficiently encodes the isosurface configuration inside each voxel cell to further minimize the network overhead. Finally, our algorithm can adjust the point distributions using different illumination settings to adapt to different network speeds.

Interactive point-based isosurface extraction

“…Using a view-dependent approach, grid cells are subdivided until they reach a sub-pixel size in screen space and can be rendered as individual points. More recently Ji et al [16] proposed to use points to achieve interactive non-photorealistic rendering of isosurfaces for remote visualization of large data sets. However this method assumes the computation of the triangulated isosurface at interactive frame rates by a server with high computation power before the rendering step.…”