Adaptive Algorithm for Accelerating Direct Isosurface Rendering on GPU

Direct isosurface volume rendering is the most prominent modern method for medical data visualization. It is based on finding intersection points between the rays corresponding to pixels on the screen and isosurface. This article describes a two-pass algorithm for accelerating the method on the graphic processing unit (GPU). On the first pass, the intersections with the isosurface are found only for a small number of rays, which is done by rendering into a lower-resolution texture. On the second pass, the obtained information is used to efficiently calculate the intersection points of all the other. The number of rays to use during the first pass is determined by using an adaptive algorithm, which runs on the central processing unit (CPU) in parallel with the second pass of the rendering. The proposed approach allows to significantly speed up isosurface visualization without quality loss. Experiments show acceleration up to 10 times in comparison with a common ray casting method implemented on GPU. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the fastest approach for ray casting which does not require any preprocessing and could be run on common GPUs.