Stoachastic Approach for Integrated Rendering of Volumes and Semi-transparent Surfaces

In this paper, we propose a technique for semitransparent rendering, which can integrally handle irregular volumes and polygons without visibility sorting. A projection technique for rendering of the irregular volumes requires a large memory space to calculate the visibility sorting at each viewing point. To solve the problem, we regard the brightness equation as the expected value of the luminosity of a sampling point along a viewing ray, and we propose a sorting-free approach that simply controls the fragment rendering by using the evaluated opacity value to calculate a rendered image. In our experiments, we applied our technique to several numerical simulation results and confirmed its effectiveness by rendering the volume with its semi-transparent boundary polygons and demonstrating the application of our technique to a high-resolution distributed display system.