Rendering and Compression of Large and Animated Volume Data

Many areas in medicine, computational physics and various other disciplines have to deal with large or animated volumetric data sets that demand for an adequate visualization. An important visualization technique for the exploration of volumetric data sets is direct volume rendering: Each point in space is assigned a density for the emission and absorption of light and the volume renderer computes the light reaching the eye along viewing rays. The rendering can be implemented efficiently using texture mapping hardware: the volume is discretized into textured slices that are blended over each other using alpha blending. However the huge amount of data to be processed for rendering large and animated volumes also demands for compression schemes that are both very efficient in terms of compression ratio and in terms of decompression speed.