vlib: A Volume Graphics API

Abstract

This paper describes vlib, a generic application programming interface for volume graphics which supports many of the significant developments in the field to date. We present an overview of the interface and describe how its novel object modeling framework is able to facilitate a variety of modeling and rendering features, including scene graphs allowing constructive object representations, normal perturbation, spatial deformations, hypertexturing and more. We also discuss a volumetric ray-tracing algorithm for producing high quality images with a minimal memory overhead. The paper closes with some comments on our Open Source implementation of the interface and its underlying graphics system.