An Improvement to Ray Casting: A Model Based Approach

An optical model as well as an implementation model for ray casting is presented. Then it is demonstrated how this work’s proposed rendering method relates to these models. The optical model expresses how a point with in a volume is affected by the light source and density. In the implementation model a viewing plane or in other words a 2D plane comprising of pixels casts a ray for each pixel along a particular viewing direction. In order to obtain a single color and opacity value for each pixel, voxels that are aligned with a ray perform interpolation (filtering) at a constant interval. The colors and opacities are then merged via composition in front to back or back to front order.