A hardware architecture for video rate shading of volume data

This paper presents an architecture capable of generating two dimensional images of volume data at video rates. This architecture fits into an image synthesis pipeline and uses only simple arithmetic operations and a look-up table to generate two dimensional images in real time. The shading algorithm is the grey-level gradient algorithm for shading volume data. Hardware simulations of the critical components can process a 256³ data set at 20 frames a second using a parallel implementation. Image synthesis from volume data in real time is an important technique in visualization and graphics systems