In Medical Imaging, shell rendering (SR) and shear-warp rendering
(SWR) are two ultra-fast and effective methods for volume
visualization. We have previously shown that, typically, SWR
can be on the average 1.38 times faster than SR, but it requires from
2 to 8 times more memory space than SR. In this paper, we propose an
extension of the compact shell data structure utilized in SR to allow
shear-warp factorization of the viewing matrix in order to obtain
speed up gains for SR, without paying the high storage price of
SWR. The new approach is called shear-warp shell rendering (SWSR). The
paper describes the methods, points out their major differences in the
computational aspects, and presents a comparative analysis of them in
terms of speed, storage, and image quality. The experiments involve
hard and fuzzy boundaries of 10 different objects of various sizes,
shapes, and topologies, rendered on a 1GHz Pentium-III PC with 512MB
RAM, utilizing surface and volume rendering strategies. The results
indicate that SWSR offers the best speed and storage characteristics
compromise among these methods. We also show that SWSR improves the
rendition quality over SR, and provides renditions similar to those
produced by SWR.
In Medical Imaging, shell rendering and shear-warp rendering are two of the most efficient and effective voxel-based techniques for volume visualization. This work presents a comparative analysis of shell rendering and shear-warp rendering in terms of storage, speed, and image quality. We have chosen 10 different objects of various sizes, shapes and topologies and one 1-GHz Pentium-III PC with 512 MB RAM for our experiments. Hard and fuzzy boundaries of up to 2,833 K voxels in size have been created to test both methods in surface and volume rendering, respectively. Hard surface shell rendering and surface shear-warp rendering required less than 0.5 second. In the worst case, volume shell rendering required 1.45 second, while volume shear-warp rendering spent 0.65 second for the same task. Shear-warp rendering uses on average from 3 to 6 times more memory space than shell rendering, but it can be up to 2.79 times faster than shell rendering. On average, shear-warp rendering is as fast as shell rendering for hard boundaries and 1.7 times faster than shell rendering for fuzzy boundaries. We have also observed that both can produce similar high-quality images.
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