A Parallel Adaptive Volume Rendering Algorithm Based on Information Entropy

A parallel adaptive ray-casting volume rendering algorithm based on information entropy is presented in this paper, where information entropy is introduced to measure the distribution of physical features in a data field and accordingly guide an effective data sampling. The algorithm adopts a patch-wise adaptation: Different sampling rates are assigned to the data patches according to their information entropies while uniform sampling is employed within each data patch. A composing method is designed subsequently for non-uniform sampling points on each ray. The experiments show that compared with the uniform rendering algorithm, the presented adaptive rendering algorithm can achieve a rendering speedup ratio of 1.4~2.1 in a distributed-memory environment.