Real-time external labeling layout algorithm for Direct Volume Rendering

Illustrations used in technical and scientific texts often employ labels to correlate the graphic elements and their textual descriptions. Researchers have proposed several algorithms to determine the layout of the annotations on images rendered at interactive frame rates. Generally these layouts can be classified as internal or external. This paper proposes a new algorithm for locating external labels during the real-time direct rendering of volume data. The proposed algorithm uses only the rows of pixels corresponding to the labels anchor points, which optimizes the performance and facilitates its implementation, avoiding the computation of the convex hull for the generated image. Both, the overall visualization performance and the cost of the proposed algorithm are kept in real-time (60 fps) for medium size volumes (about 2563 voxels).