Abstract

Splatting is a volume rendering technique that projects and accumulates voxels onto the screen. It is able to incorporate a variety of reconstruction kernels without extra computational overhead, as well as reduce computational and storage costs using a sparse volume representation. Previous splatting algorithms suffered from artifacts because they incorrectly separate volume reconstruction and volume integration. The IASB (Image-Aligned Sheet-Based) splatting overcomes these problems by accumulating voxels onto sheets aligned to be parallel with the image plane. In addition, it introduces a novel approach for splatting to cull occluded voxels using an opacity map, called an occlusion map, that provides a substantial speedup in serial implementations. Parallel approaches to volume rendering are able to overcome the enormous amount of computation required.