Volume Rendering
Put simply, volume rendering is the field that studies how to
effectively visualize 3D data. The majority of work in volume
rendering occurs in the biomedical domain, where research is focused on
means of effectively visualizing data taken from MRI, CT, PET, and other
modalities that produce three dimensional images of the human body.
Even so, volume rendering has recently proven its worth in other domains
such as meteorology, seismology, fluid dynamics, and others. In
particular, a variant of volume rendering known as direct volume rendering
(DVR) has proven very effective in visualizing the boundaries between
materials in 3D data sets from multiple domains.
Direct Volume Rendering
DVR differs from other volume rendering techniques in that it doesn't
rendering polygons, as traditional methods do, but rather takes advantage
of advances in graphics hardware (such as programmable shaders) to assign
different optical properties such as color and opacity to each individual
voxel (3D pixel). This mapping from voxel to color/opacity is called
a transfer function, and is the key to DVR's success. For a more
in-depth look at volume rendering, please see my
thesis page.
Research
My research, under Dr.
Dirk Reiners at Iowa State
University, has focused on supplementing the
OpenSG graphics library with DVR
capabilities. In addition to library supplementation, a good deal of
my work for Dirk has been focused on the development of an application
which runs on OpenSG and takes advantage of the existing and supplementary
functionality of OpenSG's volume rendering library. In particular,
our application emulates design aspects of
Joe Kniss's
Simian project.
Gallery
For a peak at some of the images generated using the application I've
designed, please see the Research Gallery.
