Acceleration technique for volume rendering using 2D texture based ray plane casting on GPU

In this paper, we present a very fast new GPU-based algorithm for volume rendering using the ray plane casting technique. It consists of preprocessing and main processing. In preprocessing, we reduce the waste of memory and produce the texture data which can be efficiently traversed concurrently in main processing by converting the volume data into a 2D texture of square shape in the frame buffer. In main processing, the ray plane casting and resampling are implemented by fragment programming which makes the efficient use of GPUs high performance. Early termination and space leaping have been used as acceleration techniques during the calculation of color and opacity in the fragment program on GPU using stencil and depth tests on GPU. We shall show that our GPU-based algorithm is much faster than CPU-based by the efficient fragment programming techniques used for ray plane interpolation, resampling and acceleration techniques