Implementation and Improvement Based on Shear-Warp Volume Rendering Algorithm

The shear-warp algorithm is one of the fastest algorithms based on CPU for volume rendering so far, but it achieves this rendering speed only by sacrificing the resulting image quality. This paper presents a new method that makes the resulting image quality much improved, by mending the resampling values used during the process of image compositing, nearly not affecting the efficiency of rendering. In this method, two adjacent slices are defined as front slice and back slice respectively, according to the direction of the viewing ray. A cost function is defined for describing the two adjacent slices´ effect to the slab between them. The values of the resampling points in the front slice and back slice are inputted to the cost function as its parameters, and the resulting value can reflect the information of the slab more effectively. Compositing this resulting value as resampling value will improve the image quality significantly, and overcome the drawback of image-aliasing in the traditional shear-warp algorithm.