Light weight space leaping using ray coherence

We present a space leaping technique for accelerating volume rendering with very low space and run-time complexity. Our technique exploits the ray coherence during ray casting by using the distance a ray traverses in empty space to leap its neighboring rays. Our technique works with parallel as well as perspective volume rendering, does not require any preprocessing or 3D data structures, and is independent of the transfer function. Being an image-space technique, it is independent of the complexity of the data being rendered. It can be used to accelerate both time-coherent and noncoherent animation sequences.