High dynamic range volume visualization

High resolution volumes require high precision compositing to preserve detailed structures. This is even more desirable for volumes with high dynamic range values. After the high precision intermediate image has been computed, simply rounding up pixel values to regular display scales loses the computed details. In this paper, we present a novel high dynamic range volume visualization method for rendering volume data with both high spatial and intensity resolutions. Our method performs high precision volume rendering followed by dynamic tone mapping to preserve details on regular display devices. By leveraging available high dynamic range image display algorithms, this dynamic tone mapping can be automatically adjusted to enhance selected features for the final display. We also present a novel transfer function design interface with nonlinear magnification of the density range and logarithmic scaling of the color/opacity range to facilitate high dynamic range volume visualization. By leveraging modern commodity graphics hardware and out-of-core acceleration, our system can produce an effective visualization of huge volume data.