The process of volume rendering is increasingly used for a wide range of scientific visualization application as well as for the generation of complex synthetic scenes. However, the process of viewing which constitutes the most crucial phase in rendering is also memory intensive and time consuming. This project investigates new ways to expedite volume viewing by exploiting coherency and redundancy in the volume data. In particular, the objectives of the proposed research are to: (1) develop methods to exploit coherency between rays, (2) develop methods to exploit coherency between frames, (3) develop methods to accelerate ray traversal by utilizing the empty space, (4) speed up recursive ray tracing to precomputing view independent attributes and partial coverage information, and (5) assemble the technology into a rendering toolkit that will be used for the construction of application- specific volume rendering environments. This research is expected to produce a portable rendering toolkit delivering faster than ever high quality volume rendering. It is anticipated that the toolkit will find a wide use in visualization, education, and graphics.
