Interactive rendering and efficient querying for large multivariate seismic volumes on consumer level PCs

We present a volume visualization method that allows interactive rendering and efficient querying of large multivariate seismic volume data on consumer level PCs. The volume rendering pipeline utilizes a virtual memory structure that supports out-of-core multivariate multi-resolution data and a GPU-based ray caster that allows interactive multivariate transfer function design. A Gaussian mixture model representation is precomputed and nearly interactive querying is achieved by testing the Gaussian functions against user defined transfer functions on the GPU in the runtime. Finally, the method has been tested on a multivariate 3D seismic dataset which is larger than the size of the main memory of the testing machine.