Hardware accelerated boundary enhancement in volume rendering

In volume rendering, boundary information is vitally important to identify the internal structures of the volume data. In this paper we introduce a 3D boundary enhancement filter function based on the multiple features extracted from the volume dataset. It can notably enhance the boundaries between different materials in visualization. Taking advantage of the modem graphics hardware, we achieve the interactive rendering frame rate under the standard PC. Several examples are given to illustrate its effectiveness on real clinic 3D CT datasets.